This was Reza’s original question:
This was clarified here:
The general rule we have here is that you can ask for help in understanding a homework problem (or a work problem), but we won’t do the work for you. Reza clearly crossed the line though by asking for the complete answer to the question being asked, except for the translation into Farsi. This would not be acceptable even if it weren’t work for hire.
Colibri was correct in closing the thread.
Yeah, I can’t disagree.
Reba is using the board for commercial purposes with either asking permission or providing disclosure. Both would provide grounds for closure.
Hoo-boy, I’m going to have to reverse myself. I thought Reza was tutoring someone, which I think is fine, though I’m not sure what the official position is. Here’s what Reza said:
[QUOTE=Reza]
Actually, not a friend but a client. lol
I charged them reasonably to do their assignment. It was a list of 10 words.
The words were asked to be defined and explained in two lines for each word with some examples, and also their translation into Farsi. (including typing, took me almost two hours to finish and email them).
[/QUOTE]
That doesn’t sound like tutoring.
So as long as a poster conceals the purpose of their questioning, then we can keep the thread open?
Super lame moderation, as per usual.
A really good rule of thumb would be, “If the question is interesting enough that lots of posters respond and start a discussion, it doesn’t really matter what the original intent was with the question.” Seriously, it’s not hard. Bad threads will quickly get buried by a lack of response, interesting threads will survive.
It’s hard enough to find interesting discussions on the site without the moderators looking for reasons to close threads.
But that’s not what he did. There was one he wasn’t sure about, searched multiple dictionaries and other online sources and then asked here if anyone heard about it. We helped him learn (that no one had heard that phrase) so he could go off and use that into for his work. We didn’t do any work for him.
Obviously it’s the mods call, but I think there is enough difference between helping to clarify something that then gets used in someone’s work and doing someone’s work for them. Clearly, opinions differ.
Just to be clear IvoryTowerDenizen, it’s not clear whether Reza has ever met the guy he’s helping face to face or Skype to Skype. This doesn’t look like tutoring, it looks like Reza’s being paid to do another guy’s homework. Not the end of the world, but it’s not in the spirit of board rules.
I do agree that the conversation was interesting though. I maintain my retraction of my initially posted opinion.
I questioned Reza as to the reasons for the question because I thought that it would help us to have some context and maybe determine the actual phrase he was looking for, since “wit brain” may have been a misspelling or something. I certainly wasn’t probing for intent or “the real reason”; but that’s how it ended up.
Now, in the future, I may hesitate to ask such questions for fear of revealing that an interesting question strays into a gray area of the rules. Are we all going to end up tiptoeing around questions for fear of this? That doesn’t foster an environment that is conducive to “fighting ignorance”.
Moreover, sometimes for linguists part of someone’s work itself is in fact to go onto a message board and survey people–for example, to find out about regionalism, variations in pronunciation, gauge sociological patterns, etc. This could even be part of the work of a tutor, who needs to determine native speaker responses.
So what about the ban on him asking any grammar questions ever? How is that justified?
I’ve participated in a number of these threads. And I’ve never seen one asked in a way that would be homework. He asks a bunch of “why” questions, usually about why a particular phrasing is wrong. There’s no way we are doing his homework for him.
And if we aren’t doing it for him, why does it matter where the questions come from?
And that’s without involving the commercial aspects. I don’t see what that has to do with the rules, as long as he isn’t copying from us, which, again, would be impossible because we don’t give him straight answers.
He’d be far from the only person who asks for help here about his job.
Last I checked, the board didn’t have any rules that even touched on that concept. The rule is simply that we won’t do your homework for you, not that Reza can’t do other people’s homework.
It really seems like the guy is being effectively banned for having a profession people don’t like.
Are you really drawing a distinction between “We won’t do your homework for you”, and “We won’t do someone else’s homework for you”?
Woah, he isn’t being banned or even warned so far. He just got his thread closed along with a mod note. I think the borderline aspect of this is that the discussion in the linked thread was a decent one. Frankly, I can see calling this one either way.
BigT means that he has been banned from asking similar questions.
Collibri: “Do not post such questions again.”
Which I read as, “Do not tell us your reason for posting such questions again”.
Picking nits since 1973.
Wait a minute. The quote was
emphasis mine.
To my reading, it seems that Reza finished his paid assignment and then asked the Board for help with the word(s). At that point I would think he is simply expanding his background knowledge. It could not have been to serve this client, since his work had already been finished and emailed.
FWIW, that’s how I read it, too. Which sort of opens up the question, is the question Reza asked legitimate if they have in fact already completed their assignment? And if so, is it a good rule if it depends on such bits of context that are basically impossible to provide or verify? I.e. if the exact same post is allowed in one set of circumstances external to the post, but disallowed in another, and those circumstances have basically no bearing on what goes on on the board, is there really a fruitful distinction to be made between the two? It seems almost spooky to have the legitimacy of a post depend on whether the ‘send’ button on some email has yet been pressed, or not. If I press ‘send’ after posting the question, but before the first response, or the first view, what then?
Leaving behind the silliness, what’s the reasoning behind the rule, anyway? To me, a tutor/translator/whatever going around asking native speakers about word usage doesn’t seem like something you’d want to prevent, but rather, like something you’d encourage. I certainly can’t see any harm coming to this board, even if somebody did get their homework made here; it’s not like there’s a danger anybody will sue over a bad grade. Of course, just receiving the answers to copy isn’t exactly conducive to actually learning anything, but it seems to me that this is a responsibility of the answerer, not something the rules of a messageboard are well suited to ensure.
After all, things remaining as they are, everybody can of course ask any homework question and have it answered here, as long as they maintain that it’s not in fact homework. So the rule is ineffective to start with, requiring at best the recital of a magical mantra (‘this is not homework, this is not homework, this is not homework’) to ensure impunity; it merely encourages dishonesty rather than fight ignorance.
A less borderline example is here: How Common is Bread in Different Cultures? - Cafe Society - Straight Dope Message Board
There’s a case to be made for curbing undisguised homework questions. Fighting ignorance and all that.
Yes, there is a case for “curbing undisguised homework questions.” The one in Reza’s “wit brain” thread is, as has been repeatedly pointed out, different.
I still want to know this: if a student of mine asked for my help with homework from another science class and I wasn’t sure of the answer, if I came here and asked about it would I be violating the rules? I truly don’t mean this in a snarky way- until this point I never would have hesitated- but now I would.
And I don’t mean I’d post the question and ask for answers- I’d ask for info so I could help answer the student myself.
I would think under those circumstances what you are doing is totally different from what Reza is doing. And it’s not like the only thing you have to say is on subjects that profit you and you alone.
I dunno if this also has bearing on the situation but you are also a subscribing Member. Reza is not. Should that count in the equation? Perhaps. Reza uses the site to get paid; in fact, it appears that’s the only reason they do post here.