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Comments on Divrei Torah Category
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Divrei Torah Category
It's been previously suggested to create a Divrei Torah category. With Elul coming up I'm sure there's lots that the community has to share — should we create this forum in which people can do so?
The idea, if implemented, is to create a new category, alongside our current Q&A, Challenges, and Meta categories, in which community members could post their own novel Torah thoughts, or share Divrei Torah which they heard and felt should (and could!) be shared.
- What types of themes are acceptable to discuss? Should any topic considered in-scope for questions be in-scope for posing Divrei Torah?1
- In the previous discussion it was taken for granted that such a Category would be for Articles. Should this be the proper implementation of it, where people could post their own Divrei Torah as Articles, and people can respond in its comments? Or should it be written as a Question-type post, in which people have the option to write counter-Divrei Torah in the Answers to amicably respond to the original piece?
- Currently we have the Weekly Topic Challenge ongoing. Should this be extended that the Theme of the Week would encompass both Questions on the topic as well as Divrei Torah thereon?
- Should we include a rotation, on a volunteer basis, for people to submit Divrei Torah on the coming Parsha/Yom Tov?
- Any other suggestions on how the Category should be set up?
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Please note that the CYLOR policy would extend to Divrei Torah as well. Just like we don't accept questions asking for halachic advice, we would not accept posts constructed as platforms for their poster to spread their halachic advice. Discussing others' halachic opinions, however, would be entirely allowed, if the community agrees. ↩
I think we should reserve this category explicitly for original writing by community members. Some people might be inter …
3y ago
We need to think carefully about editorial standards and process. We don't want to become a platform for people to post …
3y ago
Summary of Proposals The consensus seems to be strongly in favor of pursuing this idea, so long as there's strong qua …
3y ago
I like the idea of divrei torah prompting "response" divrei torah. If we make the original d'var torah a question and u …
3y ago
On the question of quality control, I'm much more in favor of a passive approach over an active one. You might consider …
3y ago
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We need to think carefully about editorial standards and process. We don't want to become a platform for people to post crackpot ideas to the internet without restriction.
In Q&A, the structure imposes some inherent limitations on what people can post. Every question needs to be a clear and apparently-sincere request for information, every answer needs to be a clear response to the question, and there's always an opening for competing answers. Any post that doesn't meet the standards of the structure is subject to edit, closure, or deletion.
Single-author essays, by contrast, don't immediately lend themselves to that kind of discipline. There's no inherent structural requirement to accomplish a particular task (like asking or answering) clearly, and there's no potential for apples-to-apples competition for fitness (as there is with answers to a question).
So, we need some other mechanism for ensuring that we're not just creating a place for people to dump their writing, without quality control. I don't know exactly what mechanism to use. Here's some brain-storming:
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Your #2, inviting response divrei Torah, introduces some potential for interplay, recapturing some of the benefit of competing answers.
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We could say that any devar Torah that doesn't achieve above a specified threshold vote score by the time it reaches a specified age will be deleted, either automatically if we can get the feature added to the platform, or by mods. That would explicitly add community-based quality-control.
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Combining these ideas even more strongly, we could invite divrei Torah only as answers to open-ended questions like "What's your devar Torah for Re'eh 5780?", and again, delete any answers that aren't above some threshold after some period. Here, each devar Torah is in direct competition with others on the same subject for both attention and votes. (Note that this idea can also be tied in very smoothly with weekly Challenges.) We could either restrict the posting of these questions to specific administrators, probably with a regular schedule, or we could let anyone post the questions and have some special requirements for their form (including open-endedness).
In conclusion, I think that some sort of explicit rules are necessary to impose structure and quality control on divrei Torah. However, I also think it's very important that whatever rules we come up with are concise, clear, and to the point, so that anyone can read them and start writing, without first going over the rules with an attorney and then making sure to apply a bunch of special, arcane formatting. Q&A has proven to be a great format for community building of Judaism knowledge; let's see what we can do to share some of its strengths with divrei Torah.
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