ReworkingClosurePoliciesChemSE
There have already been calls to summarize our close reasons and lay them out objectively, in that they should be more of actionable and decidable than fuzzy and subject to interpretation. Instead, discussions on homework have often been long winded, turning into questions about high school level questions, to those about data mining, etc. There has never really been a comprehensive stance on every single proper point. This post is a culmination of all those words of wisdom from the past four-five years, and an effort to formulae them as community guidelines. The post is undoubtedly long, as it also touches a lot of topics that are often closed/discussed as homework when they shouldn't be.
This repo currently has five files:
- "Reworking off-topic closure policies" (main policy document): is a complete containment of the main problems with homework, what to do with it, and all other points interconnected with it.
- "Related ideas": which has all tangential ideas about our closing in general. A good read.
- "Ideas that need discussion": policies that we still haven't got a good consensus about, and it would be good to sort them out soon after we sort out our homework policy.
- "What effort do I need to do before asking a question?": a new proposed Chem.SE meta post that lays out objective criterion for new users in case they've difficulty showing effort
- "Origins of The Homework Policy": a short background on what led to us having the homework policy in the first place.
What is most important in all of these is:
Your Feedback
- discuss/contriute by raising a new issue for a new topic. (citing the line number/heading in the corresponding document, as apt)
- in case of minor phrasal changes/grammatical improvements, as long as they don't change the origninal meaning, feel free to make a pull request.
- also use GitHub emojis (thumbs up/down) to express agreement/disagreement to other suggestions
All of this would help us reach complete consensus.
PS: Martin and orthocresol have mod powers on this repo as well (as "Collaborators").