Timeline for The [rules-as-written] tag is a good tag, but we've made it sick. Let's cure it
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
18 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dec 6, 2014 at 5:29 | comment | added | SevenSidedDie | Besides all that about wording though; as I said above, downvoting for lacking cites is a perfectly fine thing for people to do. Flagging for it is invalid, but voting is precisely for expressing how well or poorly an answer meets your personal criteria, no matter how good or weird those criteria are. Harnessing people's personal judgement (and averaging it out to hide the outliers) is the heart and soul of Stackexchange. | |
| Dec 6, 2014 at 5:25 | comment | added | SevenSidedDie | I understand that, but I think this states the "don't do that" the wrong way. In the context of agreeing with this by upvoting, that amounts to saying "yes, I agree that policy should be that nobody can downvote/flag just for lacking cites". Since that's fairly extreme as policy, few people are going to upvote it and many will downvote it. Which is a shame, because that doesn't appear to be what you intend this to say. But fair, because we don't want to solve the current special rules by just creating new ones. | |
| Dec 6, 2014 at 5:22 | comment | added | AgentPaper | I've edited my answer to hopefully better explain my position. | |
| Dec 6, 2014 at 5:20 | history | edited | AgentPaper | CC BY-SA 3.0 | Re-worded after further thought to reinforce key issue. |
| Dec 6, 2014 at 5:06 | comment | added | AgentPaper | @SevenSidedDie No. The hidden rule of "you must have citations" for the RAW tag is the crux of the problem, so breaking the culture of requiring citations, even when the question doesn't ask for them, is crucial to the solution. Removing the rule from the tag itself is one thing, but if we don't also remove it from our culture, nothing will have changed. | |
| Dec 6, 2014 at 4:31 | comment | added | SevenSidedDie | @AgentPaper Any comment on the suggestion to drop the second bullet point? | |
| Dec 4, 2014 at 20:18 | comment | added | SevenSidedDie | @KRyan Yeah, and you're welcome to, because that's what the downvote button is for: individual judgements of utility. Even super-wacky reasons for downvoting have been aired and historically accepted, because that's explicitly how the site is supposed to work. Your non-wacky reason there, that others happen to disagree with, is even more acceptable than those wacky ones. But how you think we collectively should vote has by intentional design no power or relevance. That's the beauty of SE: it harnesses disagreement for the greater good, via clever voting mechanics. :) | |
| Dec 4, 2014 at 20:10 | comment | added | KRyan | @SevenSidedDie Well, I am certainly going to downvote any answer that doesn't back up its claims. I don't think anyone should accept or upvote an answer to any question of the rules if the answer is simply asking you to take their word for it. | |
| Dec 4, 2014 at 20:09 | comment | added | SevenSidedDie | Exactly my problem: Back It Up! is not required. BIU's scope is limited to subjective answers, and extending it to cover rules questions is not supported by the community's acceptance of the Back It Up! aka GS/BS principle. | |
| Dec 4, 2014 at 20:08 | comment | added | KRyan | @SevenSidedDie I didn't say a citation was required. I said that Back It Up! was required. Which, in context, has to be done by the rules, because any other source of backing it up would be irrelevant and off-topic. A citation clarifies dramatically which rule you are talking about, and generally any kind of complex or tricky question would be difficult to answer without it, but if an answer was well backed up and accurate, then it's a fine answer and should be upvoted. | |
| Dec 4, 2014 at 20:07 | comment | added | SevenSidedDie | "The answer should be correct and should back up its correctness based on what the rules say, and it should source those rules", as far as I can tell, is saying that citations are required. | |
| Dec 4, 2014 at 20:04 | comment | added | AgentPaper | @SevenSidedDie I didn't mean to say that you can't down-vote for a lack of citations. I said that "RAW tag" + "No citations" does not automatically elicit a down-vote. As I mentioned, you can still down-vote if you think the answer is poor due to lack of a citation, but that should be because the answer is poor, not because it didn't follow the meta-rules of the RAW tag. | |
| Dec 4, 2014 at 20:04 | comment | added | SevenSidedDie | @KRyan To the contrary, requiring citations as you say, is the bone of contention. If you don't see that as a special rule, that's exactly the problem I'm identifying: it is a special rule, and we need to recognise that and step back. Answers should be judged individually, by individuals. There is no room in the SE way for meta to dictate to individuals how to judge answers via a habeus corpus built up on meta. | |
| Dec 4, 2014 at 19:53 | comment | added | KRyan | I don't see the citation thing as super-important, either way. The answer should be correct and should back up its correctness based on what the rules say, and it should source those rules, particularly in cases where different sources have different things to say. But sure, if the question-asker describes their understanding of the rules and the answer is just "yes, that's right" then whatever. Citing or not citing has not been a major issue in arguments over RAW answers. | |
| Dec 4, 2014 at 19:40 | comment | added | SevenSidedDie | And, to address an issue I see in the current wording: I think a change is necessary, yes, but I think it's necessary because we've lost our way and we need to change back to how we're supposed to use the site. Asking questions to be specific is just normal quality-control stuff; as is relaxing our uptightness about RAW-question answers lacking cites. These things are supposed to be judged case-by-case, in the context of a post's substance quality or lack thereof. I think this answer could emphasise that eliminating blanket requirements on Qs and As is a return to original best practices. | |
| Dec 4, 2014 at 19:36 | comment | added | SevenSidedDie | Shorter me: If you're going to advocate letting the system work as intended (and I strongly agree with that!), you ought not undermine it by proposing people shouldn't let the system work as intended. :) | |
| Dec 4, 2014 at 19:34 | comment | added | SevenSidedDie | I propose you edit this to remove your second bullet point. :) Because people can vote for whatever reasons they like, it's not something we have any grounds to make a policy about. People should be free to vote down if they think this answer should have citations, because that's how the system is design to organically identify answer quality. People are free to think that every answer to a RAW question should have citations, and vote down accordingly. Heck, people are free to think that every answer to a RAW question should include a picture of a chicken and vote down all that don't. | |
| Dec 4, 2014 at 19:26 | history | answered | AgentPaper | CC BY-SA 3.0 |