A low-intervention approach [rules-as-written]: back to tagging basics

Question

Sometime during the weeks of wrangling over the rules-as-written tag it occurred to me that, I am pretty sure, we've fallen into a fundamental error that may be the cause of all the problems:

Tags aren't for sending encoded signals to answer-writers

That's the job of the question body itself, organically, by being a question that people are voting on submitted answers to.

Meanwhile, the job of a tag is fairly boring: categorise the topic content of a question post so that the Q&A can be found more easily by others interested in that topic.

Somewhere along the line we've drifted into treating rules-as-written as a special signal about how a question should be answered. Somehow, we've stopped relying on the question itself to explain itself, and started leaning on this one tag to do part of its explaining.^[1] We've even embedded this meaning in its tag wiki.

Since that's not what tags are for though, it's unsurprising that it does a really bad job of that. New users don't necessarily know to even look at the tags, let alone that this one tag has a special meaning that's relevant to them. Established users argue over whether the tag applies to a question or not. Chaos ensues and madness takes it toll on the site and community.

Clarifying, tagging, and moving on has been working

The solution seems to me to return to the basics of how to clarify questions: ask for the question's important features to be clarified by the original poster, and if necessary, decorate the result with matching tags.

It's how every other tag^[1] on the site is used: they stay on questions that contain the matching content, are removed from questions that don't, and when they make us go “huh?” we dig deeper into what the question is supposed to be about by asking.

This struck me as a lightning bolt of obviousness some time after the data-gathering proposal flew off a cliff and exploded in mid-air. We were including the step of asking what someone meant when they used the tag as a necessary step to gather good data. So why weren't we already doing that, and calling the whole entire problem solved?

I've been implementing this the past few weeks. I'll see a question that includes the rules-as-written tag, but there's no body or title content that says “hey, this would call for the rules-as-written tag if it weren't already there,” and I'll ask what they meant by the tag. Sometimes it means that they misused the tag, sometimes it means that they left something out of the question.

Net result? A clearer question. And here's the critical part: Nobody needs to know what the tag means to write an on-topic answer — they just need to read the question.

This has been working so well that I think the community should adopt it. Not only does it work, but:

• it's how tags are supposed to be used anyway^[1]
• it avoids anyone needing to guess at the intentions of the OP, which prevents conflicts based on different users' readings of the tea leaves (q.v. “how tags are supposed to be used”)
• people who want to engage in RAW-focused questions can trust the tag reflects the question content
• people who want to avoid RAW-focused questions can trust the tag reflects the question content
• it makes voting take care of the answers naturally, because answers that don't answer the question's body are more obvious to all voters instead of to just those who follow the site's arcane meta discussions
  • as a follow-on result of that benefit, mods have no need to police answers for being Not An Answer: votes down do the job they've always been meant to do, which is disincentivise poor answers and incentivise fixing poor ones / deleting unsalvageable ones
• it improves every question that receives such attention
• it attracts more relevant answers to RAW questions in a natural way
• it shows that we care about curating quality questions for our citizens who enjoy deep engagement with the RAW analysis lens
• it doesn't require changing the tag's name, just using it like a normal tag
• it doesn't require adding any other tags to “catch” mis-tags from askers looking for “the tag for rules questions”
• it no longer has to be precisely and perfectly applied to questions anyway, because the consequences of the tag's presence no longer includes answers being policed, just whose attention the questions attract; this means that my own and others' drive to find the exact line between a RAW and non-RAW question can be set aside, and we can be more organic and relaxed about figuring out where to add/keep the tag

It is, overall, the absolute simplest and least-intervention way to resolve the issues that everyone has had, on all sides of the dispute.

What to do, as a user

None of this requires mod powers. It's something we can all do to improve the signal-to-noise ratio in the rules-as-written tag.

1. So when you see a question talking about RAW or engaging in implicit RAW analysis: that's what the tag is for labelling, so add it!^[2] It will signal to our RAW analysis experts that there's something worth their attention.

2. And when you see a question use the rules-as-written tag without any content that would seemingly justify adding it as in (1) above, ask the poster to clarify what they were meaning when they added the tag. When they respond, revise the post to match, either by adding the overt RAW analysis material to the question's body, or by removing the tag. Don't forget to thank them for clarifying!

Feedback

As strongly as I believe that back-to-basics treatment of this one tag works and will strip away the angst around it and around the subcommunity it's related to, I have experienced incorrectness in the past! If I'm totally out to lunch, let me know where this thing is in error.

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1. _{I know that we make an exception to this rule for game tags. That's for good reasons that don't apply to any other tags.}
2. _{Note that a question talking about just rules is not enough for it to be about rules as written. The correct tag for “the question is mentioning rules” is the rules tag, which has been blacklisted since it's useless. rules-as-written is not just a synonym of rules!}

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Responses to objections

This section contains responses to specific objections, in the manner of academic discourse in published papers.

The objection that there is no problem that needs fixing

This is still a solution in search of a problem

There are at least two overt problems that would justify seeking a solution, if not this one.

1. There is considerable community friction over how the rules-as-written tag is used.

   There are concerns that altering the tag's usage at all, especially by mods, is a prelude to expunging RAW experts from the site. There are concerns that it is being used as a synonym for rules by site novices. There are concerns that the status quo involves excessive intervention among answers on questions with the tag.

   These are all real problems, in the sense that they are a source of community conflict. If this is a solution in search of a problem, finding a problem is by no means difficult, nor a reason to pre-emptively reject the solution as effective for solving the problem of conflict. A rejection must be based on the merits of the solution to resolve the problem of community conflict.

2. Using rules-as-written to signal what answers are acceptable is a misuse of tags.

   Tags must describe body or title content. The job of signaling what answers are acceptable is for the body or the title content. It is a prima facia problem if rules-as-written is being used for a job that is contrary to the purpose of tags.

   Again, rejecting this solution pre-emptively because it has no problem to solve is invalid, as the problem it aims to solve has already been explicitly stated. A rejection of the solution must be based on its merits instead.

   Regarding the problem of rules-as-written being used to encode information absent from the question itself, it is a direct solution to that problem. Other solutions may be better at eliminating the meta-use of rules-as-written, but the possibility of multiple solutions that would solve the problem is not evidence that the present solution would not work.

There are at least two obvious problems that need fixing. Treating rules-as-written as a normal tag by getting clarification and making sure the question itself is complete before the tag applies is explicitly aimed at solving both the problem of community conflict and the problem of the tag being used for non-tag purposes. How it would accomplish this has been described in detail already.

Answer 1

I like this idea! However, I do share concerns over our history of comments that leave a sour taste in folks' mouths.

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say this proposal may sink or swim on the basis of how approachable our clarification-requesting comments will be.

Something I've noticed--and several folks have told me they experience it too--is that having a well crafted pre-made comment really helps keep things on a steady emotional keel. Even when I need to modify a comment for a particular post, having that pre-made foundation is very useful.

To that end, I offered to make a new meta question as an update to this old thread, and after the upvotes on this post I've made the thing! It invites users and moderators alike to suggest situations in which a pre-made comment would be useful, and to workshop the best way to phrase such comments. That seems like a good place to work out some best practices for implementing this policy:

Pre-made comments: A resource-gathering & workshopping thread

Many moderators use this script to make commenting more efficient, and I suggest anyone who plans to be active in enacting this proposal take a look and see if it will help them too.

Answer 2

I also like this idea, but I wonder if it's going to really fix the problem long term.

History of the RAW Tag

Here's all the meta questions debating the RAW tag and its meaning, use, and validity, stretching back to 2012: https://rpg.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/rules-as-written (it makes for interesting reading, especially as many participants, including mods past present and future, change their minds about the tag over time). And it appears that the problem is festering, because every time the question comes up (posted by different people each time) you can see that it is the cause of an even larger explosion of bad feeling on the site, you can clearly see the escalation in each set of posts as time goes on. That's the core problem that needs fixing, and it's one that is brutally obvious and needs no further proof. We haven't been solving the problem, we've been saying stuff that sounds good and kicking it down the road, allowing it to snowball to where now it is nuclear to even discuss.

We've Talked About This Solution Before - But It Didn't Stick

In these previous questions about [rules-as-written] we've gone through several rounds over the years of declaring "tags should describe questions not answers" and "don't use it as a meta tag" and "tags shouldn't have special rules" and all the same things we're saying here, all of which I agree with per se. But we've said them all before. What exactly are we going to do this time to get this to stop being such a bone of contention?

Disclaimer

Obviously the RAW playstyle is welcome here, just like other playstyles - very few of which we have tags for, I will note. The discussion about tags and how to apply tags is completely separate from playstyle accommodation and shouldn't be viewed as an attack on it. (We planned to burninate the [gm] tag too, and not because of a player-led pogrom against gamemasters everywhere.)

Conclusion: We Need To Bring This To A Conclusion

I don't have a specific solution I am recommending at this time, but we need to solve the problem for good now - if we just kick it down the road again because "it's painful and people are all heated up," we're just relegating the site to 10x as much vitriol and disruption in another X months when it comes up again, brought up by yet another user who perceives the unresolved ambiguities. We should consider whether this proposal does enough or whether it's just a longer version of some of the answers that have already been posed for this problem over the last 4 years, and how we actionably intend for it to turn out differently this time.

Answer 3

The tag really needs to be renamed or made a synonym.

Not there's anything directly wrong with the tag. For people who hang out in RPG forums and are familiar with RAW/RAI arguments it precisely describes what it's all about, and I know a lot of our users who follow the tag come from that environment.

Unfortunately, a lot of the new users who wander into RPG.SE don't come from that environment, and aren't actually looking for a strict RAW analysis when they use the tag. They have a question about rules, that's the only major tag with the word "rules" in its name (since, as mentioned, we blacklisted the rules tag for being both a meta tag and uselessly vague), so they slap it on their question even though their question has nothing to do with how the RPG.SE community would like the tag to be used (or with how the greater RPG Internet community would understand the tag's name).

Renaming the tag has been proposed before and received a somewhat positive response from the community (as of this the post, the proposal is +6/-3). As mentioned above, the phrase "rules as written" has a very distinct meaning in a broad swathe of the community that perfectly encapsulates how the tag is intended to be used, and the tag's adherents would be absolutely correct to say that changing it to anything else will cost it clarity with users coming from those parts of the greater RPG community. But the current phrasing is also causing a lot of misuse (which as mentioned, is the fault of the blacklisted rules tag rather than the RAW tag itself).

Further, the tag is somewhat unique in the greater StackExchange ecosystem in that it partially exists to place a constraint on answers rather than simply describing the question. While I think that's a mechanic that has its uses in this case as well as possibly on a few other stacks, it's definitely not the norm for tags on RPG.SE in particular or SE in general. To those who claim that the tag wiki explains its intended use: Don't kid yourselves, hardly anybody, especially new users (who are the most likely to misuse tags) reads tag summaries, much less wikis. The only way to get the message through that this tag has a special use is to make the tag's name itself explain that use. (Apparently that aspect of the tag is part of the problem.)

To sum up, I strongly feel that the RAW tag should be renamed/synonymed to something that better encourages, or even explicitly describes, its correct use so we can finally put the recurring shitstorm that surrounds it to rest.

The linked proposal suggested answer-must-quote-rulebook or answer-requires-rules-citation. Those are... somewhat clumsy, and exacerbate the "tag places requirements on answers instead of describing the question" problem. On the other hand, raw has been proposed and would solve the primary source of confusion, the word "rules" in the tag that keeps luring new users into misusing it.