Handling news questions about current events

Question

We keep on getting asked questions on ISIS. I have no problem with the subject, but most of these questions are about current news, have little-to-no evidence and are all around receiving weak or downright poor answers. This in turn generates nonconstructive discussions and ill will.

Also, they seem to be focused on the shock value of the claims in order to attract upvotes.

We clearly need to address this in some way, because all the discussions are not good for the community.

What should we do to maintain quality on the site?

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Explaining the problem better:

• Our current policy is not to answer unless some positive evidence is found. In other words, proof that the claim is either wrong or right. These questions are unanswerable by our current standards, until the events are not current and historical evidence accumulates.

• Our current policy is to only allow better sources to confirm or dispute a claim. You can't dispute a news item with another news item. You need a better source, like a primary source.

• We do not allow questions based on original research. The reason that we are experts in evaluating the quality of studies and of reference, not at actually producing studies or investigative journalism.

• We only want conclusive answers, not answers which are predictably going to be obsolete in weeks if not days.

• Voting is clearly not punishing these bad quality answers. The reason for this is "drive by" upvotes coming through the hot questions list.

The problem is that these questions get continuously answered with posts that are in direct contradiction of one or more of these criteria. I can see only three alternatives:

1. We don't change anything regarding policies on questions or answers. This means deleting all these poor answers even if highly upvoted.

2. We don't allow answers until the dust is settled, thus discouraging "let's debate the news" answers and voting via putting the question "on hold".

3. We change the site rules so these answers are acceptable. I strongly oppose this option.

Answer 1

I think this is a special case of what was once called "Too localized." That is to say, the evidence available in determining the answer changes rapidly. What appears to be the correct answer today may be proven wrong by information discovered tomorrow.

Would it therefore be appropriate to put a ban on current events questions? Of course, that would require a meaningful definition of "current events" and I would propose something along the lines of:

Questions about unresolved current events and issues currently under investigation by a court of law, government, or other similar investigative body are off-topic.

Answer 2

I think most of the ISIS questions are getting good-quality answers.

Did Snowden reveal that ISIS is a USA-Israel tactic? has received three answers. One with 20 upvotes and +75 for bounty (unawarded?), one with 5 upvotes and an acception, and one with 3 upvotes from a user with a history of so-so answers

Is ISIS beheading children in Mosul, Iraq? has one answer with 15 upvotes and an accept, which seems to accept the need for skepticism.

There is reason to be skeptical, as the recent news about the call for female genital mutilation by ISIS and some other grand claims were wrong too.

The other answer, though only having a net score of +1, seems to have done some research work.

To use more Wikipedia policy, Skeptics.SE is making the internet not suck.

Answer 3

In this comment, Jaydels wrote,

This is what I've taken to calling an "allergic" reaction - where we ban something harmless or useful (like all current events) because they are similar or correlated with an actual threat (questions about which there is no verifiable truth. Some of the most interesting questions are current, and information is most useful at the time misinformation is most visible. What we want to address is questions that appear to lack verifiable facts. But that's hard, because we often don't know what's not out there till we ask. TL;DR -Banning all current events would do more harm than good, IMO.

IMO the real motives are revealed in the OP:

• We keep on getting asked questions on (the same topic)
• They seem to be focused on the shock value of the claims
• All the discussions are not good for the community

The fact that the claims are based on unverifiable evidence is another factor but perhaps not the main or only factor. You could ignore (not try to make a point of) the "it's hard to find other evidence for this" aspect of the problem, and instead concentrate on three bullet-points above, for example:

• This situation happens rarely (don't need a new, general rule for it)
• When it happens it can be dealt with by moderators using their existing discretion / freedom and power of execution action / benevolent-dictatorial powers / intra-moderator consensus, e.g. as outlined in this answer.

IOW a moderator could close it with a comment like, "We've already had enough questions like this; more like this one wouldn't be good for the community", perhaps adding some words like "community values".

Answer 4

I don't believe the questions should be grouped into a bigger question + answer set just on the basis of them being similar. As Sterno put it on the gaming stackexchange site:

We are not a wiki. We should not go out of our way to act like one.

I think the problem with these claims is that they come from current news events. Several will be cleared up (or forgotten about) within a week or two. I am not in favor of banning current-event questions, rather I would suggest a compulsory wait-time before they show up. Tag + shelve, and open back up in a pre-determined time. A similar thing happened to one of my questions, and I see perfect sense in it.

Answer 5

+1 to Spork's answer for the idea of letting the question chill for a while. In my experience some questions such as this one needed at least a week, for the story to be investigated and the evidence to be published.

• The value of this site is that it publishes evidence, maybe 'sober second thought' about a subject.
• Conversely perhaps it's not the purpose of this site to express an opinion on subjects for which there is (as yet) insufficient evidence, i.e. on "breaking news" stories.

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Flimzy's answer said,

Of course, that would require a meaningful definition of "current events"

One way to do that would be to say that a (notable) claim must be at least one or two weeks old, before it's allowed as the topic of a question.

Alternatively, say that new/recent claims are allowed, however the subject/topic of the claim must be an alleged fact that is at least a week or two old.

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Enforcing this rule could also be seen/excused as an extension of wanting the OP to do some minimal research of their own before posting a question: IMO some of the "ISIS" questions in particular (and "current affairs" / news questions in general) suffer from, "This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful".

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Enforcing this rule also fits with the site's "no original research" policy: i.e. we're not allowed to research topics, therefore other people must have had time to research and publish evidence on topics.

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There's a real-world value to allowing 'fastest gun in the west' answer on StackOverflow (i.e. it's helping people to fix their programming problems in real time).

It's much less clear that it's worthwhile to encourage real-time answers on this site.

Answer 6

I think the biggest risk with 'hot off the press' topics is of a rapid loss of interest as the 'next big thing' comes along: leaving in its wake a load of half-answered (and half-arsed) answers, which may never get cleaned up.

And even if they do get cleaned up, it's broken windows in the intervening period.

And cleaning up is a heck of a lot of work. How many hours have we collectively put into trying to salvage this question and its answers? Was that time well spent? (OK, that wasn't a fast-moving current event, but you get my point: leaving 'naff' question because they 'might get better later' is NOT productive).

Answer 7

The upvoted and accepted answer to What is the standard of proof here? says,

Different disciplines will have different standards. An historical "proof" cannot be as convincing as a chemistry "proof". Hard science experiments must be reproducible, other sciences can only examine existing evidence. Some statistical sciences can only examine correlations. The standards of proof differ from field to field, and from case to case.

I think that the important bit is to disclose the level of confidence we can attribute to a claim.

We are not interested in passing judgement, but only to present and summarize the available evidence.

In the OP you write,

most of these questions are about current news, have little-to-no evidence and are all around receiving weak or downright poor answers.

Are the answers poor? If an answer provides some evidence but the evidence is insufficient for proof, is that a poor answer or is it just poor evidence?

IMO:

• If an answer provides any evidence (even circumstantial evidence, insufficient for 'proof', or a media report) then the answer is on-topic
• Users can upvote or downvote an answer based on the quality of the evidence
• Users can use comments (or answers of their own) to criticise the quality of evidence presented
• An answer with poor evidence isn't necessarily a poor answer: it may be the best answer possible given the poverty of the evidence available

Better evidence can always be presented later, if better evidence becomes available/known. Until then:

• Even poor evidence might be better than no evidence
• It might be worth knowing (worth being able to say in an answer) that the evidence is poor

Answer 8

Also, they seem to be focused on the shock value of the claims in order to attract upvotes.

Most of the questions are about claims which do have an inherent shock value , the shock value makes the claim popular and notable. Unfortunately such claims are also basis for foreign policy of the western world including united states hence the importance of answering such questions early on with the available evidence is far important and useful then letting the claims float with available evidences that contradict it.

Rather than closing the questions altoghether which may even go into oblivion as people would later forget about it, we should counter the individual answers for lack of evidence and remove them on sight.

Answer 9

Perhaps combine the questions into a single "Is there reliable evidence for atrocities committed by ISIS?"? Most of the questions seem to be trying to tease out the same basic issue, but with different examples, and I suspect the answers will be much the same for all of the examples (more journalism required before the question is really answerable - as Articuno suggests).

I didn't originally post this as an answer as I don't know if it is possible, or would cause the moderators more trouble than it is worth with the ensuing complaints! I definitely agree though that there is diminishing value in having so many closely related questions.

Answer 10

The reason for closing "to recent" is nonsensical. Asker finds a claim that he founds dubious and claimed by a "notable" source, he asks.

If you believe claim (conspiracy theory) is too recent and you DON'T HAVE INFO one way or the other, then YOU DON'T KNOW and just DON'T ANSWER.

When facts or new info becomes available to answer then you are welcome, you might even contribute something useful.

1.We don't change anything regarding policies on questions or answers. This means deleting all these poor answers even if highly upvoted.

Bingo. Answers that are opinions without basis should get downvotes. Answers that do Upvotes. Easy.