“What’s wrong with single word requests?”

Question

In the proposal to merge ELU and ELL, the asker in passing mentioned:

On the other hand, many native speakers actually ask questions such as single word requests which should not be the focus of ELU anyway.

Very shortly afterwards, and with complete absence of chalance, another member inquired after this remark as follows:

What's wrong with single word requests?

I’m moving that discussion here lest it overwhelm the other question. For not only is this a fine question in and of itself, it is one which I feel we should periodically reassess.

To that end, here were some of our previous discussions about this problem. Most include postings by Community Managers and Site Moderators concerned with this grave issue that confronts us all.

• Single word requests, crosswords, and the fight against mediocrity
• On deleting low quality single-word-request answers
• Against single word requests
• Are single word requests always welcomed questions?
• Word for disrespecting eldest half-sister by referring to her husband as girly-girl-manly-boy though he's amused but the rest of the family isn't?
• Are single word requests allowed?
• Can anything be done about mean-spirited requests for terminology?
• Reconsidering the single word request

As you can see from reading those, single word requests have always been a problem on this site, and the situation has if anything gotten worse as time has worn on.

Let’s finally do something about it

My own personal opinion is that we should get rid of these if at all possible, and severely curtail and restrict them if not. It doesn't matter whether the request is for a single word, a phrase, an idiom, a proverb, or any other related “guessing-game style” of request.

No matter what guise they take, these are all a drain on our site quality and a drain on our community’s time, both moderator time answering flags and that of the general community running the review queues.

These posts do not fit with the SE model. They are mere guessing games. Often the most highly upvoted “answers” are mindless copypasta with no original text to speak of. They draw one-liners that are essentially unexplained and unsupported single-word answers that get automatically flagged for low quality. And everybody and his dog, and his neighbor’s dog, thinks they should add yet another one-liner “this is my opinion” suggestion years down the road, even though that one was already given a long, long time ago.

These are not answers worthy of our site.

I am becoming increasingly convinced that all requests for words and phrases are fundamentally a poor fit for the SE format. They're just guessing games and popularity contests, too broad and opinionated.

They draw low quality contributions and copypasta. They drive away the very experts we seek to attract, for these are not expert answers well suited to a site for linguists, etymologists, and serious English-language experts.

Usually there is no research. People haven’t bothered to look at a thesaurus or even Google. These almost all wind up being thinly veiled requests for writing advice, programming advice, and shaming advice.

But you know what? We have no reason being in any of those three businesses here. That’s why I say good riddance with bad rubbish! Let’s get rid of them and move on.

But what I say isn’t that important. The important matter is. . .

What does the community say about these?

Answer 1

TL;DR

Single-word requests are not the problem, they are just the kind of questions where some problems (in particular lack of guidance) predominantly manifest themselves. Only addressing these problems will lead to actual progress.

Some of the criticism described in the question is specific to single-word requests, but it is either not an actual problem or only applies to a small subgroup of problems.

The General Problems

The following problems are not specific to single-word requests; they are just more prominent in them. Banning single-word requests on their account would not solve these problems and we would get fed up with other question types soon. Rather we should address these problems in a more general matter.

Lack of Guidance for Askers

I think that many users asking single-word requests can actually produce good single-word requests if they receive proper guidance, preferably before asking.

Unfortunately, we do not have many ways at hand to provide users with guidance before they ask a question. Okay, there are tag warnings but they are broken. This problem is not specific to single-word requests; we see it with all sorts of questions. It’s not even specific to this site; on Let's Plan the Second Iteration of the Stack Exchange Quality Project!, the top answer and many more address this very problem. Instead of banning single-word requests, where this problem is very notable, we should lobby for a general mechanism to give askers guidance.

What we can do ourselves is give askers better and early guidance. As askers are not automatically informed about close votes (or even closure), we should help them with comments as early as possible. There was an attempt to create a repository for pro-forma comments, but it didn’t really take off. We really need some sort of resource for reviewers (and other power users) to make it as easy as possible for them to properly guide askers – not only for single-word requests.

Lack of Guidance for Answerers

Many of the above problems apply to answerers as well, however in addition I witness many high-reputation users leaving the following canned comment from the low-quality queue under single-line answers¹ for single-word requests (or the slightly modified one if the answerer has the comment privilege):

This does not provide an answer to the question. Once you have sufficient reputation you will be able to comment on any post; instead, provide answers that don't require clarification from the asker.

This is misleading as those answers are not proper comments. Moreover it does not provide any guidance whatsoever as to what is wrong with the question. We have to educate these reviewers that rather should not choose a comment and even better write a fitting comment themselves (or upvote an existing one).

Disposing of Bad Answers

When I obtained access to the review queues, I often skipped single-line answers¹ because I didn’t know whether I should flag them for deletion or not. Past discussions on Meta did not yield clear information, so I asked a question myself. Unfortunately many of the answers skipped one of the cases, but as a general tendency I would say that the community favours quick deletion.

While this outcome causes many reviews, these reviews are particularly easy. Single-line answers¹ on single-word requests can be clearly identified within seconds. So, I really do not see the reviewer and moderator load as a problem, as long as we all agree that immediate deletion is the best course of action for these answers.

^{¹ more precisely: answers without reference or other backup.}

Answers in Comments

This wasn’t mentioned in the question, but this is something that annoys me about many single-word requests (and other types of question). These lead to long, unnecessary, and unproductive comment strings, loss of structure and quality, and they lead to moderation work.

In my opinion, this should be addressed by clearly banning answers as comments and agreeing that they are free game for flags. If sufficiently many users raise a non-custom flag, such comments can even be deleted without moderator intervention – but then we need to agree upon this. However, this should be discussed separately.

“I want this to be an expert site”

There seems to be a pattern on Stack Exchange sites (in particular language sites) that a group of high-reputation users wants them to be an expert-questions utopia. They want to gerrymander the scope such that it only allows for questions they are interested in. This is a bad idea.

As soon as a site has reached a certain popularity, it will automatically attract non-experts asking non-expert questions, and this is a good thing because it keeps the experts (who are most likely to ask expert questions) entertained. Moreover, while a single non-experts are less likely to ask expert questions, non-experts in total are more likely to do so due to their sheer number.

Unfortunately, not all experts are entertained by the same sort of non-expert questions, so most experts have to live with some non-expert questions they do not care about, be it single-word requests, questions on punctuation, or trivial grammar questions. If we want the site to strive we have to live with a portion of questions that we do not like. And the good thing with single-word requests is that they have their own tag and can thus be easily ignored.

Besides, I do not think that single-word requests are non-expert questions: Most of them cannot be answered with a dictionary or thesaurus (and I find it silly to require people to put a boilerplate statement that they searched a those, if it is not obvious what keyword they should look for). They need somebody whose vocabulary already contains the word – a feature most likely to be found on an expert.

Now, what can we do about all of this? Raise awareness and accept that we do not have to like every question on the site.

The Specific Non-Problems

While most of the problems with single-word request can be addressed and are not specific to them, there is some critique that I do not consider an issue:

The Guessing Game

These posts do not fit with the SE model. They are mere guessing games.

I beg to disagree. Of course, we can only make an educated guess as to what really helps the asker, but that applies to all Stack Exchange questions to some extent and at the end of the day, it only decides about which answer will be accepted, if any. What answers the question as posted is not a guessing game (at least for good single-word requests), can be evaluated by voters, and is useful to future visitors.

More than once, I was looking for a word and found it an answer in a single-word-request that was not the accepted one, because the question was about a sufficiently general problem.

Copypasta

While it’s inherent to the nature of single-word requests that answers are little more than a dictionary quote, I do not consider this a necessarily bad thing. The challenge lies in connecting this information with the question. Also, we are helping the asker and possibly future visitors.

“writing advice, programming advice, and shaming advice”

I do not see how this applies to more than a tiny fraction of bad single-word requests that should probably be closed. It’s not a problem of single-word requests in general.

Conclusions

• Do not ban single-word requests in general.

• Pressure Stack Exchange to give us some mechanism to inform askers and answerers before they post anything.

• Install clear and easy guidelines for reviewers and other power users to reduce the reviewing workload.

• Accept that each of us has to live with some questions that we do not particularly find interesting.

Answer 2

I accept that we see a ton of bad SWRs every day that show almost zero research effort. Those bad apples shouldn't make us ban the "requests" concept entirely.

Sometimes even tech-savvy users like me find it difficult to google certain things. So it's very helpful to ask experts in the language.

IMHO, SWRs, and the like, should remain on ELU. And we should focus more on how we can reduce the number of bad ones.

Answer 3

I don't think this issue is an easy one before English Language and Usage (ELU) clearly sets its target audience and strategy. Almost all the guidelines on ELU are vague and grey except for those on a request for proof-reading and translation. That's why there are disputes and arguments among users. Some are more lenient and others are more strict. For example, we have a close reason for Single Word Request (SWR) questions as follows:

Questions on choosing an ideal word or phrase must include information on how it will be used in order to be answered. For help writing a good word or phrase request, see: About single word requests

The above close-reason means

1. You need to write an example sentence where the word or phrase would be used. There are many questions that don't have it and still remain unclosed and answered by users. Examples are abundant in SWR Tag and Phrase-Requests Tag.

2. It excludes idioms and expressions request. They usually contain some context for users to suggest idioms or expressions. I don't think they are problematic as long as they have detailed context for which the idiom or expression would be used.

As a compromise for the time being, I'd like to suggest we close all SWR questions that don't have any example sentence. We need to post a comment requesting the OP to come up with an example sentence and if they don't respond, let's close them. I think it is a good start before considering banning all the SWR questions immediately.