How do we handle motivated users with poor English skills?

Aralun commented 7 years ago

It was recently brought to my attention that a user, despite their motivation, was being fairly unhelpful as their English level was very low.

The issues I can think of right now with this specific group of users are the following:

They are barely understandable by proficient English speakers, let alone by not-so-proficient ones;
They may not actually understand SO rules or ours;
They may not be able to explain their actions in our room or on Meta.

How should we handle those users?

tripleee commented 7 years ago

What sort of guidance are you hoping for? In the worst case, there really is no way to proceed, short of learning their language, at which point SO is definitely the wrong site.

AdriaanVisser commented 7 years ago

First step is probably getting a feel for their level of English. If they have a passive understanding of English sufficient to determine whether a post should be moderated. If that is the case, they can flag and/or leave canned comments, so as to be clear in their opinion themselves. This to make sure their own active English skills are not in the way of them moderating.

If, on the other hand, their passive English is not sufficient to determine post quality, they probably do not belong on the English SO at all.

The main difficulty I see with the first point is that if a post they commented/voted on is discussed, either in the room or on meta, they can't make their point clear as to why they voted/commented in that way.

Tunaki commented 7 years ago

Bookmark.

The room is not an English learning site and there was no real issue with this in the past. Each user needs to decide if their English skill is good enough for them to properly operate on Stack Overflow (answering is part of that also). We can always point them at canned reason.

SO-Close-Vote-Reviewers / SO-Close-Vote-Reviewers.github.io

How do we handle motivated users with poor English skills? #15