How do we ensure that questions on this site attract scholars and enthusiasts?

Question

Intro: Building our Community

Our tour says that we aim to be "a question and answer site for scholars and enthusiasts of literature." I'm definitely an enthusiast, and I have a fair bit of scholarly training. And there are many other users on here whose scholarship and enthusiasm are evident from the effort they put into crafting questions and answers. Scholar isn't restricted to those credentialed, of course; someone who, for example, painstakingly reads and re-reads a novel to establish its timeline is a scholar whether or not she has an academic degree.

That said, we still struggle to achieve a critical mass of such scholarly and enthusiastic users. Our community is rather on the small side. Perhaps we could think about how to attract more such users to the site?

One possible barrier is the ratio of good questions to less good ones. I believe that if we want to attract and retain true scholars and enthusiasts, we might benefit from considering a higher bar for questions that we retain on this site. Otherwise, the front page of our site can be off-putting to the very audience we need to attract.

Here are what I see as some problem areas. Some of them have been discussed before. I don't mean to relitigate those issues, but I do want to reframe them in the context of perhaps handling them differently to better attract the user base we need. I do have some proposed solutions as well, which I'll post as an answer.

Homework questions

We've discussed homework before, and the upshot was: "let's not treat homework questions differently from any other sort of question." But that has proven to be rather a blunt approach to the issue, because there are homework questions and there are homework questions.

Some questions might have arisen from homework, but still be interesting in their own right. The question about "Tissue" which prompted the prior discussion about homework is worth answering for that reason. The question also raises no ethical qualms, as the OP made clear that plagiarism was not really possible given the context of the question.

Other homework questions, such as the question about A Modest Proposal are actually detrimental to our goal of attracting scholars and enthusiasts. I think professors or schoolteachers who see such questions posted and answered here would think of us as a resource for students to cheat.

We need a better way of handling this than simply to say, "Homework questions are all right."

Questions about the meanings of words

We get a lot of questions where the OP simply doesn't know the basic meaning of a word. Again, we've had this discussion before. I think there is a meaningful (ha!) distinction to be made between asking for the meaning of a word in context, and asking just "what does this word or phrase mean?" I agree with Gareth's answer in the previous discussion that meaning in context questions can actually lead to very interesting answers. But more recently, the sorts of questions we get have been of the basic, "look it up in a dictionary" sort. Here are some recent questions of that nature:

• Seldom anything but
• Draw on
• Broad
• A very splendid specimen
• The Grapes of Wrath

These preponderate: eight of the fourteen most recent meaning questions are of this sort. We had a similar flood of those with the Swimming in the Dark questions a couple months ago. They provide an easy way to build rep, but they are not about literature per se except by happenstance: the word is used in a literary work. We become indistinguishable from ELL except that the questions all come from quotations from literature. The sheer volume of such essentially non-literary questions waters down the quality and identity of our site and makes it less attractive to someone looking for a more purely literary discussion.

Simplistic questions

We get questions that seem rather poorly thought out. For example, the questions about whether Hamlet is a misogynist, or why a book might use epigraphs, or whether a particular novel contains explicit sex, or whether a not particularly Shakespearian phrase from a Shavian play indicates inspiration, all seem naïve about their subject matter and/or about how literature is studied. Left as they are, they would detract the sort of audience we want to build. I'm not proposing that we turn away unsophisticated questions, but we need to encourage our askers to refine those into better ones. Instead, sometimes we ourselves edit and re-edit the question to try to make it suitable for our site, to the point of rendering it unrecognizable from what was originally asked.

So: Do others agree this is a real issue we face? If so, how do we resolve this issue? What can we do to ensure that the site retains high quality questions that meet our goal of being attractive to more scholars and enthusiasts?

Answer 1

Intro: two opposing effects

You raise a lot of valid points here, and there's definitely a possibility that too many "simple" questions on our site will tend to discourage "experts" (academics, scholars, people with deep knowledge and interest in literature) from contributing or even seeing this as a serious site. But there's also another point of view, in that we can't expect to have a userbase built entirely of people with that kind of deep knowledge and interest, and we need to cater to people with a more casual interest in literature too, not discouraging them from contributing by appearing to be too "high-brow" or snobbish. The latter issue has been discussed in several meta posts here already, such as:

• How will we avoid literature snobbery?
• Should we embrace non-Googlers?
• Who are the experts? Not us. We've grown a philosophical bezoar - let's work this through!
• Our site can be cold, unforgiving, and unapproachable. We're driving people away. What should we do about it?

(I should emphasise that all four of those posts are from 2017, when the shape of the site was rather different to what it is now. For what it's worth, my feeling is that, back in the early private beta days, our biggest problem was people posting low-effort or poor-quality Q&A and getting upvotes on them - if you look back at some of the posts from early 2017, you might realise what I mean - and that nowadays we have a lot higher density of excellent quality Q&A. On the other hand, later in 2017 there was also a problem with many unwelcoming comments driving away non-expert users, which I think the 4th meta post above was partially a reaction to.)

If we go too far in making the site appealing to scholars, we risk decimating our active community - there aren't that many SE-active people with degrees in literature or the requisite knowledge and enthusiasm to answer loads of "high-brow" questions. (I know that some active SE people already see this site as "pretentious" or don't feel they can contribute usefully here despite being avid readers.) On the other hand, if we go too far in making the site appealing to casual book readers, then we risk alienating the very people who help to drive our quality up. Both of these potential effects need to be borne in mind when discussing these quality-control issues.

Homework questions

It's not quite accurate to summarise our current policy as "Homework questions are all right." It's more that being homework isn't per se a reason to close a question. Many homework questions aren't a good fit for SE and can be closed for being opinion-based or needing more focus (e.g. discussion prompts). Some, as you've noted, can be perfectly fine questions for us.

But do we run the risk of being seen as a cheat-sheet resource by allowing and answering even "good" (by our standards) homework questions?

Maybe the solution is to be more proactive about editing and re-shaping such questions. If we can make them ask the same essential question, in a way that'll encourage good answers here, but so that they're hardly recognisable as homework questions, then everyone wins: our site gets more quality contributions, students get answers which may not exactly address their homework but can give them ideas to write their own essays, and teachers won't be turned off by seeing homework questions with cheating answers here.

Let's take that "A Modest Proposal" question which you chose as a bad example:

• Identify five instances in the text "A Modest Proposal" where Swift exhibits his misanthropic attitude towards humanity and explain how.

  Obviously a homework question, right?

• Does "A Modest Proposal" by Jonathan Swift exhibit a misanthropic attitude towards humanity? How does this attitude come out in the text of the story?

  Seems like a reasonable question for our site. No arbitrary "five instances" requirement, but asking for answers to be backed up by reference to the text itself is reasonable. If someone here gives a good argument referencing only 3 or 4 passages in the text, the student can do the remaining work themselves.

Of course, we could require people to do this editing work themselves, by closing their questions on sight and only reopening after they've been edited into a fit state. But what do we do if the OP never bothers coming back to edit? Leave a question closed when we could've edited it into a good contribution to the site? Better, surely, to have the content of a good answer here, even if it means a little more editing work for us. Besides, site veterans are more likely to know how to make a question work well here than a newbie who just joined to get help with an assignment.

TL;DR: for homework questions that can fit here, EDIT to make them less homeworky and a better fit!

Meanings of words

When this was discussed before, Gareth's response proved that most of our meaning questions are not simply basic dictionary lookups: they require some deeper analysis, or some context from the surrounding text or knowledge of the story, or at least the answers could be enhanced by such analysis/context even if they don't strictly require it.

(By way of comparison, let me mention What is the meaning of "dole cheque" in the following context?, which was migrated here from ELU. It can be answered by a single simple fact, dole cheques being paid every fourteen days, but is IMHO much better answered by exploring the significance of this line in the context of the story, how it helps to build up the characters and the contrast between their lives. Lots of meaning questions are like this: a dictionary would give a technically correct and complete answer, but a more literary viewpoint could give so much more information.)

You're not wrong, though, that some meaning questions really are answerable by a simple dictionary lookup, and we never really formed a consensus on what to do with those questions. Perhaps they would be better off on ELL, but we should be very very careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater - I've seen a lot of close-votes over the years when people think a question "should be on ELL" but it's actually answerable here with a lot of literary depth. For this reason, I wouldn't like to create a direct migration path from here to ELL, because once a question is migrated it's tricky to get it back, whereas an ordinary closed question can easily be reopened, or migrated by mods if necessary.

The wording of a new off-topic close reason should really be hammered out in a separate meta post, but for now here's a possible draft:

This question is purely about the meaning of an English word or phrase, and literary context does not help to answer it. Please consider if your question suits our English Language Learners site better.

TL;DR: let's have a close reason for basic meaning questions, but be very careful not to overuse it.

Simplistic questions

I would argue against closing questions that "seem naïve about their subject matter and/or about how literature is studied", on the grounds of the second of the "two opposing effects" I discussed above. Everyone is naïve to begin with, and I'd rather help those people learn than turn them away altogether, assuming their question is at all answerable.

I realise you're not proposing to close these questions, but instead to prepare some FAQ-type posts with information to help them learn and educate themselves. That's a great idea, I'm just not sure how exactly to do it. Tsundoku may have some better suggestions, but:

• One possibility might be to isolate some general literary principles and write main-site Q&A to illustrate them in action. user111 did this with close reading, and we might be able to continue his work with some other exemplary Q&A for other approaches or ideas about literature.
• Another possibility would be to make a meta post listing some resources for further reading. We have What are some good (legal) resources for finding the text of books? already on meta, so maybe we could create something else for resources on how to study literature, not just where to find it.

Whatever kind of guidance we provide, of course, a lot of people aren't going to bother reading it. There's nothing we can do about that: you can lead a horse to a library, but you can't make it read. But every single naïve-about-literature person converted to a producer of high-quality Q&A is a victory!

Answer 2

In this answer I'm going to put on my consultant's hat and analyze the post as if it were a business proposal.

Summary

The question sets out a goal (to attract more scholars and enthusiasts), identifies a barrier to achieving the goal (the ratio of good questions to bad ones is too low) and proposes a plan for removing the barrier (closing questions in various identified categories).

The question does not include market identification (who are these scholars and enthusiasts?), customer analysis (has the main barrier to participation been correctly identified?), risk analysis (what if the plan fails? are there any downsides even if it is achieved?), and alternatives (are there other plans that might achieve the same goal?)

These omissions should be rectified before taking the proposal forward for consideration.

Market

The proposal invites us to accept the premise that there exists a population of literature scholars and enthusiasts who would like to take part in the site but do not do so because of barriers to participation.

A basic step before embarking on the plan is to have some evidence that this market exists in sufficient numbers to justify the planned effort. Many businesses have made the mistake of putting effort into developing products for which there turned out to be little or no market.

How might you identify this population? Well, other Internet communities might provide evidence. Perhaps all the scholars and enthusiasts are posting on, for example, r/AskLiteraryStudies?

Barriers

If practical, a business will try to incoporate feedback from target customers into its plans, for example via surveys, focus groups, "beta" testers, or product samples. Before putting effort into removing one barrier (the ratio of good to bad questions) it is important to be confident that this is the main barrier. But I suspect that for scholars in particular there may be other barriers:

• Advertising: the target market is unaware of the existence of Literature.se.
• Time & effort: someone studying or teaching literature will already have assignments to complete or classes to prepare and may not want to do more as a hobby.
• Copyright: a scholar might be concerned about possible future publication of their ideas, and so reluctant to license their work as Creative Commons.
• Hierarchy: a scholar might be used to operating in an environment where they are deferred to based on their position, or where they can depend upon a particular level of knowledge among their colleagues, and might find it uncomfortable to handle an environment where this is not the case.

Risks

Any plan comes with risks and costs that need to be balanced against the proposed benefits. In this case I can see some risks that could result in failure of the plan:

• The target market may not exist, or may be very small.
• The barrier to participation may have been wrongly identified, or is only one of several barriers.

And some costs:

• Closing questions may lead to conflict with and/or the departure of members of the user community who found value in those questions.

Answer 3

I don't think we have difficulty attracting enthusiasts (which is a vague term anyway); the difficulty appears to be attracting people who post questions and answers that would interest people with a more scholarly interest in literature.

What Makes Literature SE Unattractive to Scholars?

Since posting my previous answer, I have given this question more thought. Below are a number of characteristics that, in my opinion, make Literature SE unattractive to scholars. Note that these reasons come on top of the fact the scholars (i.e. from academia) won't get credit for contributing here and that the time they spend here is time they can't spend on research and the publication of journal articles and conference papers.

1. Voting Behaviour Does Not Reflect Question Quality.

Our five highest-voted questions are Why was 1984 set in 1984?, How do we know Humpty Dumpty was an egg?, Snoopy can balance on an edge atop his doghouse. Is any reason given for this?, What is Hobbes? (from Calvin and Hobbes) and Has copy protection ever been used in physical books?.

If we look at just the highest-voted questions since January 2021, we get Did Gaiman and Pratchett troll an interviewer who thought they were religious fanatics?, Is Babar an African or Asian elephant?, Did H. G. Wells use an emoticon in “The Time Machine”?, How could sixty cents of $1.87 be in pennies? and What is the opposite of deus ex machina?. Among the above ten question, only three are about authors that expect to be taught at universities (Orwell, H. G. Wells, Oscar Henry). These questions have a lot more votes that, for example, How has knowledge of the Ur-Hamlet evolved over the centuries? (8 votes), How do these lines in Shakespeare's Sonnet 151 mean what they're supposed to? (11 votes, and yes, scholars sometimes write articles about the meaning of one or two lines).

I'm not saying that questions that may interest scholars never get a lot of votes; see, for example, Were English poets of the sixteenth century aware of the Great Vowel Shift? (20 votes). However, generally speaking, people vote on questions because they like the works discussed in the questions rather than because of question quality. Hence, the bias towards, comics, science fiction (including Orwell) and fantasy in the highest-voted questions. This is reflects a totally different preference from what gets taught at literature departments.

2. Voting Behaviour Does Not Reflect Answer Quality.

On the Stack Exchange network, the first answer has much higher chances of getting the most votes than answers posted one or more days later (see also "fastest gun in the West" on Meta SE). Late answers get fewer votes, even if they are better. This is absurd from the point of view of scholarly research, where scholars build on the work of others to come up with better answers. What's worse, answers that are demonstrably false may keep a high score even after they have been proven wrong. For example, What is the meaning of "Georgian Verse"? received an answer in December 2018 which got eight upvotes. In February of this year, two answers were added that pointed out that the first answer was wrong. The incorrect answer still have eight votes (+9, -1). What's more, it received two upvotes after it had been proven incorrect! Try attracting scholars with this disdain for facts! (Another example is an answer claiming that Shakespeare wrote "classical tragedies", which gathered four upvotes within 10 hours, more than what many correct answers get.) The same issue can be seen when comparing votes on answers across questions. For example, I wrote the answer to What is the Magazine Equivalent of ISBN? in less than 10 minutes, the question went HNQ and the answer got 5 upvotes. Similarly, What does "Bool-var" mean in "In the Midst of Alarms"? took no effort either but reached HNQ, which biased the votes (27). There are many answers that required a lot more effort but that have 2 votes or fewer, e.g. Why does George Eliot call night "bright" and "radiant"? (2 votes), What does "speed the plow" mean in David Mamet's play? (2 votes), Sonnet 39 of Astrophil and Stella: Are these epithets or metaphors? (2 votes), In chapter I.5 of Finnegans Wake, how are the "paper wounds" ordered?, Did John Milton ever mention Martin Luther directly or indirectly? (1 vote), What are the poetic devices used in this poem and how do they relate to its meaning? (2 votes).
My point is not that effort guarantees quality but that quality is not properly rewarded with votes, whereas no-brainer answers can get a lot of votes. As someone commented recently, the no-brainer answers are "easier for people to get their head around". Voting on answers seem to exhibit a version of the Matthew effect: answers with more votes have higher chances of attracting more upvotes than other answers, especially when the answers are ordered by votes, even when the highest-voted answer is not the best one. And on some occasions, people seem to upvote answers without taking the time to read it (see e.g. Gareth Rees's chat comment from 02.01.2022).

3. The Accepted-Answers Feature Does Not Make Sense.

The question whether the accepted answer feature is good for this site was already asked in March 2017. At the time, Hamlet wrote,

The thing about accepting an answer is it can be misinterpreted as saying that there is nothing to discuss. (…) On a site like literature, where there are multiple ways to analyze the same text, it's important that people feel comfortable describing alternative viewpoints even if it's not the viewpoint the OP expects.

Related to this is the question How can an accepted answer be chosen from two equally accurate literary analysis answers? (which has two answers with the same number of votes). That is just one of the issues with this feature. Answers sometimes get accepted very quickly. For example, the answer to Does Joyce use interior monologue in "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man"? after just over 20 minutes after it was posted (according to verbose, who wrote the answer). (In March 2017, one answer on SFF SE's meta apparently got accepted within 16 seconds, "hardly enough time to click on and read the answer".) My answer about the oldest Braille book was accepted within 10 minutes of being posted. Another issue that has not been discussed in a meta question is the fact that people very rarely change the accepted answer when a better one is submitted. I am aware of very few examples of answers that were unaccepted: Is there really a single "Old Babylonian version" of the Epic of Gilgamesh? (in March 2020), possibly What does "between us there was, …" mean …? (see Rand al'Thor's chat comment from August 2018) and possibly What does Lady Macbeth mean by "what thou art promised"? (based on a Napoleon Wilson's / Cahir Mawr Dyffryn æp Ceallach's comment in chat). (It is difficult to identify answers that have been unaccepted because this is not recorded in an answer's history.) And the answer to the question Was the Wood in Tales of Goldstone Wood inspired... was delete-voted after it had apparently been accepted (see this 6 December 2018 chat comment by Rand al'Thor, who was not a mod at the time). From this point of view, it may be a good thing that "It's quite unusual for answers to be accepted on this site" (verbose in chat, 18 November 2020). (Some users decided to never accept answers. On the other hand, we also have a few accepted answer with a negative score.) In literary criticism, many questions can never be settled definitively, so an "accepted answer" feature does not make much sense from a scholarly point of view.

4. The HNQ Algorithm Is Biased Against Questions That Require Extensive Research.

Let's look at the HNQ questions from December and November 2021 (in reverse chronological order) and check which ones might interest scholars:

1. Why does Aphrodite speak like this while disguised as the old woman?: Iliad (04/11/2021);
2. What is meant by "traffic" in this list of men's activities?: Boccaccio's Decameron (06/11/2021);
3. Does this edit in The Magician's Nephew (from "had her bathe" to "had her bath") fundamentally change the meaning of the sentence? (09/11/2021);
4. Which ancient Greek politician punched a teacher for failing to carry his copy of Homer? (10/11/2021): quote source; not necessarily a literary source;
5. Edmund Spenser's sonnet "My Love is like to ice, and I to fire" (10/11/2021): meaning/interpretation question;
6. Cappello, Cepparello, Ciapperello, Ciappelletto - what's it all about?: Boccaccio's Decameron (13/11/2021);
7. What does Nestor's love of a "good horse" have to do with anything?: Iliad (21/11/2021);
8. What do the letters G and D mean in "The Trout" by Sean O'Faolain? (21/11/2021);
9. Looking for the name of a book written by a persecuted Christian in the late Roman Empire (22/11/2021): identification request;
10. Meaning of 'white mask on my otherwise tan face' (30/11/2021): understanding of non-literary concept;
11. Does "football" mean "rugby" in Winter Holiday by Arthur Ransome? (02/12/2021);
12. What does "One fancied things sometimes—fancied a fellow was looking at you queerly" mean from And Then There Were None? (03/12/2021);
13. Was Philip Larkin factually correct when he implied that in 1955 the streets in Ireland were "end-on to hills" more often than those in England? (03/12/2021);
14. When did Macbeth kill Duncan's chamberlains? (05/12/2021);
15. What does "royalty in nature" in Macbeth mean? (06/12/2021);
16. Who coined the term "omniscient narrator"? (08/12/2021): literary terminology;
17. Short Story about several Mall Santas (09/12/2021): identification request (10 upvotes);
18. Who said that history is a lie/fable agreed upon? (10/12/2021): quote identification; non-literary text;
19. What is the Magazine Equivalent of ISBN? (11/12/2021): answered 12 minutes after it was posted;
20. Aslan as an alternative version of Jesus as the form in which he may have appeared in an alternative reality? (12/12/2021): fantasy;
21. When and where did Thomas Mann say that Effi Briest is one of the six best novels in his library? (14/12/2021);
22. Who is 'he' in 'He has no children?': not difficult, but requires a careful look at a passage from Macbeth;
23. Short story about paranoid parents whose baby dies in the barbed wire set up to protect it (19/12/2021): identification request (14 upvotes);
24. In Mary Tighe's Psyche, what is the gemstone referred to by allusion? (19/12/2021): literary allusion;
25. Appalachia, Chicago, 1920s, Gertie, 3 year old child run over by train in rail yard (21/12/2021): identification request (more about this type of question below);
26. Who is "Dr. Johnson" in Meinke's "Apples"? (24/12/2021): answer based on Wikipedia articles, such as Appeal to the stone;
27. Why is snow compared to "ash" in the poem "Snowfall"? (24/12/2021): understanding of non-literary concept; answered by means of a stock image of embers and ash;
28. Why is Helen's speech here in the Iliad described as being given "warmly"? (Iliad; 24/12/2021): good; the answer includes a quote from the Homeric Greek text;
29. Connection (if any) between James Baldwin and "Easy Rider"? Why would he be signing a copy circa '60s or '70s? (24/12/2021): answered 9 minutes after the question was posted;
30. Why does the prophecy imply Macbeth has to murder the king? (26/12/2021): good; something literature professors may need to explain to their students;
31. What "always was and is the occupation of the Agolanti"?: Boccaccio's Decameron (26/12/2021): at least this question couln't be answered by simply looking up Agolanti on Wiktionary or Wikipedia;
32. "Sly frantic wretch, that holp'st to make me great" what is the meaning of "holp'st"? (26/12/2021): a basic meaning question in Shakespeare; see holp on Wiktionary;
33. How much of the English history in this Decameron story has any basis in fact? (28.12.2021): OK;
34. What is "the line children draw to represent a bird in flight"? (30.12.2021): this HNQ provoked the following chat comment: “Indicating once again that the effort put into an answer is inversely proportional to its likeliness to go HNQ. (No offence @Spagirl, it's a perfectly decent answer to that question, but hardly your most difficult or time-consuming answer on this site.)”

Compare the above list with a sample of questions that might be used to show off our site:

• Why don't Mr. Bennet's daughters get to inherit the Longbourn estate?,
• Can three unstressed syllables constitute a substitute foot in Shakespeare?,
• Were English poets of the sixteenth century aware of the Great Vowel Shift?,
• Where was the Odyssean Ithaca?,
• Since when has Shakespeare's "Scottish play" been considered unlucky? (managed to reach HNQ),
• Did T.S. Eliot really plagiarize in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"? (managed to reach HNQ),
• How has knowledge of the Ur-Hamlet evolved over the centuries?,
• Can the influence of the 1918 "Spanish flu" pandemic be seen in T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land"?,
• Which short stories are falsely attributed to Guy de Maupassant, and why? (managed to reach HNQ),
• Was T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" plagiarised?,
• Origin of symbolic interpretation of Prospero's breaking of his staff?,
• When was Shakespeare's The Tempest first analysed from a "post-colonial" perspective?,
• How long does the story of Watership Down take?,
• How many of the original Sherlock Holmes stories are fixed in time?,
• Krazy language in Krazy Kat, 25 July 1936,
• What does it mean when Ralph is thinking about Piggy's death in Lord of the Flies by Golding?,
• Where and how did James Joyce condemn Hamlet as a failure?,
• What happens at the end of The Scar by China Mieville?,
• Pride and Prejudice: Why did Elizabeth think "my uncle and aunt would have been lost to me"?,
• How does the editor know that seven lines are missing from Wordsworth's Home at Grasmere?,
• Why do we see so little mention of Leopold Bloom's social isolation in his internal monologue?.

Most of these questions and answers were suggested on the meta site in response to Rand al'Thor's quarterly best-of questions. The intersection between HNQ and the best-of is rather small.

5. Certain Question Types Dilute the Site's Focus

We currently have 165 quote-source questions, some of which have nothing to do with literature (greg-lemond: two questions) or were simply found on social media (e.g. Love is defiled by its defense … and Sadness is caused by intelligence). Quote source hunting may be fun but if it does not help us understand literary allusions, it does not contribute anything to our understanding of literature.

We also have 602 unclosed identification-request questions (10 such questions are currently closed and 27 deleted ones. This is our third-most-popular tag (after meaning and poetry). Currently, 339 of these questions have a score of 4 or higher; 68 have a score of 10 or higher. I find this difficult to explain, since identification requests rarely benefit anyone except the question asker. In addition, many of these question have been answered by people who had not even read the book in question; the answer only required better internet search skills. From a scholarly point of view, this is absurd.

These two types of questions do not create a favourable impression if we want to attract scholars.

6. Contributors Use Pseudonyms

Scholars publish under their real names because there are rankings and assessments that depend on the number and nature of their publications (journal article, conference paper, book chapter, etc.). The large majority of people use pseudonyms (for a variety of reasons), which makes it harder to the users and the site seriously.

---

I will be posting separate meta questions addressing some of the issues discussed above. I will be maintaining a list of such questions below:

1. If we want to attract more scholars and enthusiasts, should we rethink our policy on story identification questions / identification requests? (05/01/2022).
2. How should the accepted-answer feature be changed? (13.02.2022).

Answer 4

This isn't exactly an answer. It's an explanation of what attracted me, personally, to become an active user on this site. I joined 109 days ago. In that time I've accrued 1.8k rep, 16 questions, and 8 answers.

First, a friend (@PrinceNorthLæraðr) pointed me over here. While exploring I found this question: Symbolism of the Mind Game in Ender's Game, which led to me making an account. Why was it particularly interesting for me?

• I love Ender's Game.
• While there was an answer (now deleted), it was terrible. I could do better.
• There was an interesting, focused question (the symbolism of the Mind Game) that I knew how to answer (or at least where to look for quotes)

Okay, so I had an account. I was working on an answer. In the meantime, I posted my first question. It was about a book that I love, and it was well-received and made me trust that this was a good site for my questions. It should be mentioned that part of why I stay here is because I enjoy chatting with fellow users; I'm active in the site chatroom and find it welcoming, with both deep discussions and random chit-chat.

Coming back to the point. What kinds of questions attracted me, specifically, here?

• Questions about books that I enjoy reading. The questions were interesting, and inspired me to start writing answers. Work diversity helps here - if this site was entirely discussions about Shakespeare and 1984, I would've left.
• Questions that obviously had some thought put into them. Dictionary-lookup meaning questions and no-effort homework questions detract from having more of this kind on the front page.
• Questions that seemed possible to answer with access to the work itself and some time. I'm a high school college student, without mind-blowing search abilities. Complex academic questions, while interesting to some people, are not really possible for me to interact with.
• Questions with good answers. I like reading the answers over and over, if nothing else.

The answers I write are few, but are to questions that I find interesting. (Except my answers to the recent flood of questions. I didn't find those interesting, but was just trying to stem the flow). Having interesting questions posted is therefore motivation for me to keep working on answers.

But while it seems to me there's been worry over what effect questions have on answerers, I consider myself more of another class - a question asker. I'd like to think I ask good questions. The main motivation for asking good questions is getting good answers. I keep posting questions here because I trust that at least some will get interesting answers. I trust this mostly because I see other good questions which are getting good answers.

I don't know if any of this is useful, or even new. But hey! A first meta post has to happen sometime, and I had something to say.

Answer 5

Intro: Two Steps

If others feel that the issue raised here is real and worth addressing, I'm sure they will have other suggestions and ideas for how to tackle it as well. Here are a few suggestions of my own. We could perhaps take two steps in tandem to improve the quality of questions:

• Develop our help site more fully to provide better guidance
• Be more willing to close questions, always explaining to the asker that they can be reopened after editing.

To elaborate on these ideas:

Homework questions

StackOverflow has specific guidelines about homework questions. One is:

Make a good faith attempt to solve the problem yourself first. Users here respond negatively if your question gives them the impression that you're asking them to do your work for you. On the other hand, questions which ask about a specific issue which you're having a problem with usually receive a much better response.

We could adapt this for our own purposes. We could ask, for example, that users not just paste in their homework question verbatim (as with the "Modest Proposal" question), but instead show us what effort they've made to tackle it themselves, and where they're stuck (as with the "Tissue" question).

Another SO guideline:

Ask about specific problems with your existing implementation. If you can't do that yet, try some more of your own work first or searching for more general help; your professor is likely to be a better resource at this stage than Stack Overflow.

I think that translates to Don't ask overbroad questions. We get questions from time to time asking about the theme of a poem, story, etc.:

• "After Apple-Picking"
• "The Deserted Road"
• "Sordello"

Such general questions are different from asking how a work or an author develops a specific theme. We could encourage/require specificity in the questions asked.

Meanings of words

Honestly, here I think we just need to be hard-nosed and follow our stated rule. We say the following is off-topic:

Questions about the English language in general, not just as it relates to literature or specific works of literature. Try asking on the English Language & Usage Stack Exchange or English Language Learners Stack Exchange instead.

We should be willing to close basic meaning questions as off-topic. I understand two things:

• The asker might not know whether the question is more properly an ELL query or a Lit SE query. We ran into that issue with the Swimming in the Dark questions. But we can direct the user appropriately in that case.
• There might be a genuine difference of opinion about whether a particular meaning question is basic, or allows for a good answer. But that's why we have a system of close votes. I might find a question too basic, someone else might disagree and choose to leave the question open. We should at least be willing to entertain close votes for "belongs on another site" with the other site being ELL or, far less likely, ELU. That isn't even a possibility here; the only "belongs on another site" option is Meta.

Simplistic questions

We could beef up our guidance on how to ask a good question to help users improve their own. For example, we could say:

• If asking about the meaning or theme of an entire work, suggest what you yourself think the meaning or theme might be
• Just as in SO, one is expected to provide code snippets illustrating the problem, we could ask users to support their question with quotations from the text they're asking about

And correspondingly, we should be willing to vote to close on questions that don't follow these guidelines.

Rate-limiting

We've seen twice in the recent past that not capping the number of questions a given user can ask per day floods the site with questions that are very hit-or-miss. Perhaps setting a limit on users who have, say, <2,000 rep would help; the asker would have more time to develop better questions based on feedback to prior ones, and the front page wouldn't look iffy to someone who was checking the site out.

Conclusion

In all these cases, the common thread is that we need to ask our users to put in a minimal, good-faith effort to think through the question themselves before posting it here. To my mind, this is a reasonable expectation. Before asking "Is Hamlet a misogynist?", a user could spend a few minutes considering the case for and against based on evidence from the text, and then sharing that evidence with us in the body of the question. That would make a better question; it would be more likely to attract good answers; and it would be more in keeping with the standards we've asserted regarding scholarship and enthusiasm. Otherwise, we are in danger of staying in a rut where we fail to thrive and build the community to its full potential.

Answer 6

I am in favour of increasing the quality of the questions we get on this site. At the same time I'd rather not leave students in the lurch; especially when you are reading in a foreign language, dictionaries are often insufficient to help you figure out what a specific word or phrase means, for example. If we want a bit more effort question askers, we should provide more guidance on how and where to research certain basic things. For this reason, I suggest that we create a few additional Meta FAQs, such as:

• How and where do I research the meaning of words and phrases I don't understand?
• Resources for researching literature questions. (This is inspired by Resources for Researching Language Learning Questions on Language Learning Stack Exchange but may not transfer very well to literature.)
• Possibly: How do I avoid asking questions that are too broad? (See also How do I avoid asking questions that are too broad? on Language Learning Stack Exchange.)
• A list of online glossaries of literary, poetic and rhetorical terms.
  (Update 22.02.2021: Where can I find glossaries of literary, poetic and rhetorical terms? created.)

We could then refer users to one or more of the above questions in comments on low-quality questions.

With regard to rate limiting: this would prevent question flooding of the kind we saw on 18 December 2020, 19 December 2020 and 13 February 2021. It is clear that rate limiting can be done (though not by moderators); see The Complete Rate-Limiting Guide on Meta SE. For example,

(...) Other per-site limits may apply; e.g. on Stack Overflow, new users can only ask once every 90 minutes. Some of these per-site limits do also check the account, not just the IP address.

and

On Stack Overflow, Super User, Server Fault and Mathematics (not active on all other sites)

• maximum of 6 questions per day
• maximum of 50 questions per 30 days, on a rolling basis (50 questions in past 720 hours before current time).

A limit of one question per 90 minutes may be sufficient for our site. However, since this type of flooding relatively is rare on Literature Stack Exchange, it is not very likely that Stack Overflow would implement such a limit for this site.