Splitting versus lumping -- which do we want to see

Question

We currently have a number of questions about interpreting a single document:

Deciphering Lunacy Asylum case notes about patients previous history

Deciphering Lunacy Asylum case notes about nurses entry?

Deciphering Lunacy Asylum case notes about administering Paraldehyde

Deciphering Lunacy Asylum case notes about escaping through a window

Deciphering Lunacy Asylum case notes about symptoms of inflammation

There are 12 questions in total.

The OP asked for advice about whether to raise one question or multiple ones.

I argued that it would be better to keep them together to maintain the context and because they were all essentially about interpreting the writing in a single document, so there's not a lot of value in splitting them out to provide more detailed answers. If it were separate documents, or the questions were about interpretation and not just reading handwriting, I might take a different view. I also worry about splitting to artificially increase question volume and/or game the reputation system.

Somebody else suggested that they should be split out... but I think the debate should be held here and not in the comments trail of a question.

Answer 1

Personally, I think questions like these should contain only one extract per question. There are several reasons for this.

Firstly, it allows potential transcribers to attempt only those extracts that they feel comfortable with. A question with a single paragraph of text is far less intimidating than one containing half-a-dozen!

Secondly, where there are multiple possible readings of a word or abbreviation in a passage, these can all be put forward as answers (or comments) to a single question with much less risk of confusion.

Thirdly, it avoids any potential confusion should a transcriber decide to skip one or more extracts in their answer. This is probably not an issue in this case, but I have seen several wills, for example, which contain multiple extremely similar paragraphs.

Finally, limiting questions to a single extract from a document should also help avoid overly-long, and potentially unwieldy, answers (something I am often guilty of myself!)

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However, we should also be clear that links to related questions containing more examples of text written by the same person. are essential.

One of the key difficulties in reading handwriting is often recognising the idiosyncrasies in the style of particular individuals. The more text we have by that individual, the more examples we are likely to have of each letter in their hand (in this case, the way the letter "p" is written offers a good example of what I am talking about).

Answer 2

My concern in splitting up these questions is that we are treating them differently to other questions.

Essentially here we now have 5 duplicates. Yes, each of them is slightly different, but they all boil down to "how to read this document?"

If someone were to ask:

• where is John Smith on the 1881 census?
• where is John Smith's wife Jane on the 1881 census?
• where is John Smith's son James on the 1881 census?
• where is John Smith's son Henry on the 1881 census?

We would probably close these as duplicates. The answers to all the questions are more or less the same. They may or may not have been in the same household on the 1881 census, so the answer might be a different reference, but the process for finding them is the same.

I do not see why palaeography questions should be different. A good answer to such questions might include sources for improving the asker's ability to decipher further text of this kind, rather than just giving the answer.

We do have chat as well, which might be a better place for getting assistance for transcribing long documents, when there is just the odd word that is hard to read.

At the very least, we need to make the question titles unique. This will make it less likely for users to consider them all duplicates. Numbering them is not particularly helpful. I was trying to work out which ones I had already looked at and tried to read, but ended up opening the same ones several times because they have the exact same title.

Answer 3

I lean towards splitting rather than lumping but by far my preference is for right-sizing, and in these particular questions I think the one extract per question works well. To me they are not too little/granular (only one word to decipher) and not too much/coarse (3 pages with 50 words to decipher would be offputting). Focusing on an extract gives answerers enough room to not only decipher the words but also to provide any context that they can supply beyond what is written there.

I am also going to focus on your:

... worry about splitting to artificially increase question volume and/or game the reputation system.

Like it or hate it there is a degree of gamification in the design of Stack Exchange sites. It is a game we can play well and lose our Beta label sooner, or play poorly and wait longer to do so. We recently Missed it by that much( and we know that the criteria for leaving Beta are changing but not yet to what. It seems like questions asked per day may no longer be one of them and certainly they seem to be going away from seeking 10 per day. Nevertheless, I always feel far more comfortable when I see our site stats at https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/43502/genealogy-family-history looking a little healthier, like they do today:

I think the recent spike in our question numbers (from about 0.8 to 2.4) per day will help rather than hinder our chances to lose our Beta label sooner rather than later. I also think that @AndrewTruckle having "right-sized" these questions has made a significant contribution to that.

Answer 4

The question I keep circling back to is "Why are we here?" If we want the site to have lasting value, the questions and answers should be written or edited with an eye toward helping more than just the original person.

To my mind, we have three classes of questions which can be problematic, because they're tied too much to the specific case, and not likely to be helpful to others. First, the endless "what's this DNA relationship likely to be" set. Second, dating photos, and third, the "what's this word?" questions. I'd like to see this site be more than a "do my homework for me" destination -- I have plenty of "what the heck is this word" problems of my own to puzzle over without coming here to see more.

I'd rather see the extracts from the same document kept together in one question, if they are written in the same handwriting. Separating them out destroys the context and scatters the evidence over several different pages. What if we want to look at more than one fragment at a time to compare letter shapes? It's annoying and cumbersome to have multiple browser sessions open to compare fragments from different questions.

I don't want to propose a hard-and-fast rule about how many words one can ask for help with at once, but practically speaking, if there are a lot, it might be a sign that someone isn't trying hard enough to solve their own problem before coming for a second opinion. Remember how we had the question where someone plopped down the six-page will and said "help I can't read this!" with no concept of how long it would take to transcribe the entire document?

One big problem with questions of the "help, I'm stuck reading this writing" variety is how seldom the Q shows research effort. Has the person writing the Q made a letter table, consulted references or tutorials on handwriting of the period, etc. ? Very often, people don't say.