Jonathan de Boyne Pollard
2011-08-26 09:55:08 UTC
There seems to be a mismatch between the FAQ and the discussion topics.
Maybe the original aims have been diluted by students who see it as a
help desk, as has happened to some extent in aue.
That happens a lot on the other StackExchanges. SuperUser, for example,Maybe the original aims have been diluted by students who see it as a
help desk, as has happened to some extent in aue.
has a lot of what are essentially helpdesk questions from people whose
computers are misbehaving, and strictly speaking such questions should
be closed for being specific to one person and one machine, or for being
a repetition of an earlier question. (Often they *are* closed, though.)
However, I doubt that this is the reason for the FAQ being as it is.
I admit to not having read the English Language and Usage StackExchange
FAQ until now. I first came to the site from an advertisement of a
particular question somewhere else. I learned from experience with
other WWW sites in the family that the FAQs start from the same single
template and are edited to a greater or lesser degree. Some of the
sites haven't bothered much with changing the FAQ at all. There's a
fair amount of that boilerplate still in the English Language and Usage
FAQ, too.
The group sci.lang has, as I see it, a culture of wanting to stay
strictly on-topic, although it doesn't always manage that. The
alt.usage.english group is not like that, as you know, and conversations
often stray wildly from the original topic.
I don't mind that as long as the discussion remains intelligent. One of
the charms of aue is that a wandering thread often does remain
intelligent, provided that you can ignore a small handful of known
pests. Once it gets down to the level of "It is too", "It is not",
though - especially when the same points keep being made ad nauseam [*],
it's time to bail out of that thread.
This is very true. But as you also point out, sometimes there's astrictly on-topic, although it doesn't always manage that. The
alt.usage.english group is not like that, as you know, and conversations
often stray wildly from the original topic.
I don't mind that as long as the discussion remains intelligent. One of
the charms of aue is that a wandering thread often does remain
intelligent, provided that you can ignore a small handful of known
pests. Once it gets down to the level of "It is too", "It is not",
though - especially when the same points keep being made ad nauseam [*],
it's time to bail out of that thread.
nugget that one misses that way. On the gripping hand, missing such
nuggets isn't exactly a life and death matter. The sad part is that the
people who contribute the dross on Usenet don't realize that they're
exactly why the world has moved from Usenet to the likes of EL&U
StackExchange. Start an off-topic side-discussion of baking, say, or
U.S. politics, and one _will_ find one's contributions forcibly migrated
to a site where they are on-topic, or even outright deleted, by other
people. The world has created, and moved to, places where the push-back
mechanisms for topicality that Usenet nowadays so badly lacks are
enforced; because that's the environment that people want. I've
mentioned before, I think, the ILink sysop that predicted this, and
several other modern developments, in the early 1990s.