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Welcome to the Judaism community on Codidact!

Will you help us build our community of learners? Drop into our study hall, ask questions, help others with answers to their questions, share a d'var torah if you're so inclined, invite your friends, and join us in building this community together. Not an ask-the-rabbi service, just people at all levels learning together.

Comments on Divrei Torah Category

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Divrei Torah Category

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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.

  1. What types of themes are acceptable to discuss? Should any topic considered in-scope for questions be in-scope for posing Divrei Torah?1
  2. 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?
  3. 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?
  4. Should we include a rotation, on a volunteer basis, for people to submit Divrei Torah on the coming Parsha/Yom Tov?
  5. Any other suggestions on how the Category should be set up?
  1. 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.

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General comments (6 comments)
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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:

  • Your #2, inviting response divrei Torah, introduces some potential for interplay, recapturing some of the benefit of competing answers.

  • 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.

  • 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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General comments (4 comments)
General comments
eliyahu‭ wrote over 4 years ago

I would suggest instead an idea getting deleted if it doesn't meet a certain positive threshold, it should be deleted if it falls below a certain negative threshold.

eliyahu‭ wrote over 4 years ago

I've found on Mi Yodeya that if I post something that's not timely it often doesn't get too many votes. This is often not a fault of the idea, its more that nobody is interested in it at the time but next time the Parsha rolls around they would be. People should be able to post on whatever Parsha they want without fear that it will be automatically deleted because people aren't looking at it now. Deleting if it gets a score of -3 or something is a much more reasonable idea.

Isaac Moses‭ wrote over 4 years ago

@eliyahu Good point. I purposefully didn't specify a particular threshold; it could be 0 or even (but not likely) a low-magnitude negative. How a deletion policy ought to work would depend on the posting policy. If only timely responses to particular prompts are invited, then it becomes more reasonable to set a higher threshold. Another consideration is that we don't necessarily want posts that just go up and fly under the radar, since that means that there's no community-based quality control.

Monica Cellio‭ wrote over 4 years ago · edited over 4 years ago

I think I prefer that there not be a time-based component, because it could be too limiting. We don't want only parsha commentary; something might arise from daf yomi, or a shiur you heard, or a new source you read, or a different parsha that you made a leap to from this week's, or... I'd prefer to think about quality metrics more and timing restrictions less. For visibility, new posts will be as visible as new meta posts (new-post indicator, hot list, can be featured).