In my brief existence on Miyodea I have perceived a lot of pedantry. It is my belief that this is turning people away from the website and that this may constitute a chillul hashem.
For a recent example, read the comments for this question.
Does a finding of Jewish blood in a DNA test make one Jewish?
Can we change the rules to only flag questions as being unclear, irrelevant, beyond the scope, etc if many users flag them as such rather than placing this power in the hands of admins?
Assuming from the discussion tag that this is also a best practice question, and being unfamiliar with any rules that would prevent the following suggestion, I would suggest a simple solution to this and similar issues that I have seen:
If it is readily apparent what the OP is attempting to and failing to ask (particularly if they themselves express it in a comment but aren't familiar enough to realize they should edit their post), instead of (somewhat coldly) pointing out their failure, take 8 seconds to edit the post to help out the novice participant (which is what I did upon seeing the conversation going on in the comments of that question). If you want, you could then follow your edit with a ping to the OP asking if he approves of your edit, as a mod once did for me.
There is no need to be so exacting with people who merely don't realize what is expected of them. Let's be helpful instead of standing on ceremony!
I do not think that the issue at hand is that absolute power be taken away from moderators (that isn't going to happen). But I do think that some more sensitivity from moderators is definitely in order.
The first moderator comment (preceding the mod closing the question) was "Insight into what?", in response to the unclear question given by the OP: "Any insight would be appreciated!".
If I was the OP, I also would have been confused about this (and would have been scared away by mod attitudes like this. He had a question in his mind. He just needed some help to frame it. A couple of more sentences in the beginning along the lines of: "Please be more specific about what your question is and how it relates to this site."
Instead of writing: "None of us know you, your DNA results, your ancestry, or your family history, and we are a community of experts on Judaism not genetics. What would we be able to offer you?" you could frame it in a tone that feels less aggressive and more helpful, trying to aid the user into framing their question better.
I was embarrassed to see the exchange in the comments on that post, and am thankful for Monica's helpful follow up comment.
Post Closed as "unclear what you're asking. So you are saying that on the question itself it says "On Hold" at this time (sounds like a bug in the history line title then).
I'm more or less a fairly objective observer as I don't know the user nor the mod, and I figured this perspective might be helpful. There may be some past history feeding into the responses to this that I am unaware of, but here are my observations based solely on this post.
Based on the original version of the question, I think the initial comment was reasonable. There was no question. The comment asks what the OP was looking for. Once the OP clarified and asked an actual question (in a comment), Double AA replied,
If you were wondering that you can ask that, but that isn't what you did in this post.
This is a helpful comment, it clearly indicates that the OP's actual question is not being clearly conveyed in his post. It is stated matter-of-factly, not rudely (some folks may not like bluntness, but that doesn't make it inherently rude nor indicate a bad attitude). At this point the correct response from the OP would be to edit the post in order to clarify the question.
However, the OP's response misinterpreted a matter-of-fact statement as the user/mod being 'offended,' which it was then clarified was not the case.
To me this seems to be a lot of hullabaloo about a misunderstanding. Quite simply, there was no question, it was unclear what was being asked (if anything). A comment made this clear, asking for clarification. Once it was received, it was explained that the actual question was fine, but that is not what was conveyed by the post. The OP misinterpreted the comment as the user/mod being 'offended' when s/he was not, and the user/mod clarified this.
This is not an example of rude communication nor pedantry. It's a simple case of a question that didn't actually ask a question being (rightly) closed as unclear (which is an SE-wide standard), seeking clarification in comments, and then being misunderstood by the OP.
