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Every community in the Stack Exchange network has a single objective: create the world's highest quality, most complete archive of information in whatever topic the site is about. The quality and integrity of the information compiled by this community is the reason this site is here.
Titles should be optimized for clarity, ease of understanding and ...
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Personally, I reckon:
This is SE, not a clickbait site like Buzzfeed.
Titles should be as clear and searchable as possible.
Clickworthiness is no valid criterion for question quality.
There's no rule against tag info in titles.
There's no such thing as "misleading in a good way". Misleading is bad, always.
The amended title is deliberately, consciously bad....
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The rules are fine as-is.
Reference:
Should questions about sex and other adult activities be off-topic?
What's our tolerance for adult content?
But phantom, there are so many arguments!
Hey, I didn't say that the whole situation is good - just that the rules are fine. Let's back up.
Based on the existing guidelines, adult content and topics are OK.
...
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Yes, all questions must be asked in English. If you are having trouble with a particular word or phrase, you might be able to get help with it on the English Language Learners SE site.
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Since the edit (if done properly) would not change the fundamental basis of the question, I see no harm.
The OP clarified his question in a comment
I am questioning why he was even given a leadership role given his poor emotional control. The good leaders I have met have good emotional control.
Changing
Why was he appointed captain of DS9 given ...
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Disclaimer: I'm far from a regular visitor here.
I saw this question in the HNQ, and my interest was piqued, so I clicked on it. I imagined a Skeptics-style question, but in different context, but not so narrow as just Interstellar. On second thought, perhaps what I imagined as being asked would be more suited to World Building.
And then I saw it was ...
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To get an updated answer
There's a bounty reason for that:
To get the OP to review acceptance
There's no certain or by-design way of doing this. Just ping them in a comment (assuming they're still an active user and likely to see your ping, which in this case the OP is).
Alternatively, if there's already an accepted answer and not a new answer reflecting ...
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The idea that if a technology exists in the real world questions about it are automatically off-topic is just bizarre. As William Gibson has said, "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed." Of course the idea that science fiction is about futuristic technology is equally problematic...
Questions about technology may or may not be ...
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Yes, it's fine.
Good answers explain themselves. Often our story ID answers omit this bit, but that's a fault of existing answers, not a justification for future ones. A good answer to this question will carefully justify itself, talking through the querent's points and explaining how the suggested story meets those points.
This lets voters make informed ...
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From what I can see, you really have two separate concerns:
Should question titles be "clickbait-y", with an eye towards improving view/vote count?
Richard's conduct
I have thoughts on each of these, but I'll handle them separately.
Clickbait titles
I don't see a problem with this; askers are welcome to choose whatever title they want (within reason). If ...
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Adult content is on-topic, but does need to treated with more scrutiny.
I think the question body here hits on the two points I agree with most... Notability and Good Faith.
To see what I think the policy should be, skip to the bottom
The two ideas really go hand in hand. If you can show even a small amount of research as to why you are asking the ...
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Yes, in rare specific mostly objective circumstances.
Content that is in violation of "be nice" policy (that can't be edited to remove violation)
Content that is in violation of other policies (spam, mostly)
NAA answers.
Answers that objectively add zero value (not simply low quality, but really can't be fixed). Note that this doesn't apply to questions - ...
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In my humble opinion, your Avatar question was always going to suffer from downvotes.
You're essentially asking for an atomic-level scientific explanation of something that's only really explainable by saying "it's magic". Elements aren't real and when you dig too hard into any fantasy universe, you'll inevitably come up short.
That's almost certainly why ...
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When you spot an obvious error, you should absolutely correct it, ideally as soon as possible in order to prevent the OP from suffering from drive-by downvotes (from users who've stopped by to downvote the error rather than the question itself).
In this instance, I've changed the word "Captain" (which is a glaring error, Sisko wasn't made Captain until much ...
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I think this question is kinda loaded, since I don't consider the title to be click-bait and only "misleading" as a sunday newspaper comic joke. That is to say, it's a slight misdirection, in that your first reaction to such a statement is to say "WELL OF COURSE WE LANDED ON THE MOON". This title plays on reactions, but isn't lying to anyone. The context is ...
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(I feel like my answer is more like a long comment, but I wasn't sure which of the other answers it would fit on.)
I think "Were the moon landings faked?" is misleading and it would be better if the title made it clear the question is talking about moon landings as depicted in a movie.
It's misleading because moon landings really happened (or were really ...
answered Sep 28 '15 at 17:19
Ward - Reinstate Monica
9,1681 gold badge17 silver badges27 bronze badges
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The downvote tooltip states:
This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful
The edit in question was removing:
I've searched both google and the site but looks like this hasn't been asked yet.
Whilst not terribly informative it is telling us what research they have already done and is also hinting at the question not ...
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I think there are quite a few misconceptions around your question, so lets get to them:
Your assertion that the title it "clickbait" is misleading. The generally accepted meaning of "clickbait" is a title that is designed to attract attention to a post at the expense of quality or accuracy. There was nothing inaccurate or low-quality about the post in ...
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By metrics, this is a minor problem now, and could become a major problem in the future.
Story Identification questions account for nearly twice that of any other question type on the site, and are the only questions that are tracked by asked-per-week in the most popular tags. And the highest-voted Story-ID question has only two answers, both heavily ...
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You are absolutely correct re: upvoting. People upvote for wrong reason as Matthew stated (for the record, he's a mod on another site and generally knows very well how SE is supposed to work). It's not nearly as bad here as on StackOverflow though :)
Having said that, it's also possible that many people use favorite feature as a "bookmarking" facility - e.g....
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We already have such a policy:
If a question is on an adult topic, it's on-topic. No ifs, ends or buts.
Also, "weird" "urges" is entirely in the eye of the beerholder. Some people like Carey and slashfics. Some people like My Little Pony. Some people like fiction that praises genocydal tyrants. Some people like Pokemon. Let's be a wee bit more tolerant ...
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You are using the system as intended!
However, note that there are a lot of other factors at play.
People who don't know how voting is supposed to work
People who don't care how voting is supposed to work
Questions get varying numbers of views and, thus, varying numbers of votes
Certain demographics may be more or less likely to vote and questions they see ...
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Open 'em all*; let votes sort 'em out.
*except for things that are actually off-topic or out of scope
Originally, we closed such questions as "General Reference", but we had a problem where we could never totally agree on what constituted "General Reference". Almost any question can be answered via Google in just one search of the correct keywords. Closing ...
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Voting
Well, regarding voting, it depends: The quote you cite invites to upvote, if
a post is interesting, well-researched, and useful
You can easily interpret the and as or, since these categories are not binary. Being well-researched is only one contributor, particular in questions. If a question is simply a very good one ("Gee, I always wondered that,...
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The issue here is a question of answerability.
It is true that there may be some canonical source that can answer a question, there may even be an exact explanation in some third-party or even straight canon source that fully explains how these things come about.
In some questions though, that is not true. And while speculation can be fun, that is not ...
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Yes, we should at least close them (and eventually, delete).
If the ID question is vague enough as to not be able to be correctly answerable, it's NOT a good fit for SE site, no matter how much fun it is for people to try to guess the answer.
They are absolutely no different from book recommendation questions:
Please identify a book that fits {{this vague ...
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Questions should be more than just the poster's speculation
I think we can all agree this deleted question is terrible
I've been lead to believe that their is a scene in either the book or the movie were Hermione is raped/sexually assaulted by Malfoy, did this actually happen?
Questions that simply speculate without any other references should be closed. ...
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This seems to me like a disagreement among the user base that goes beyond how the moderation tools were designed.
As I'm sure you are aware, the moderation tools are reputation based. Reputation is supposed to be a (somewhat limited) gauge on how trusted you are to interact with the site tools. It then takes between 3 and 5 users with moderation tools to ...
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I agree with DVK, but I'd like to be a bit more specific and add some conditions. I don't think (or don't know if) these are enforcible through SE itself, so they're more what you'd call "guidelines" than actual rules.
Age
The question should be older than X days, for instance 7.
Vote threshold
The question's total score should be less than Y, for instance ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible