Post History

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 natural 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.