Where are our new Yoichis or How I stopped worrying and started to love the ELU-ba-bomb

Question

Suggestions are sought for interesting questions or motivators for interesting questions to ask, both general ideas and specific.

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The mechanics of the SE system (closing, voting, moderating) have been a good method for policing quality. Encouraging prior research, being specific and clear, etc.

But over the years there have always been complaints about the quality of questions. There is one kind of quality that is not addressed and that is: content, the actual subject matter of the questions.

There is a history over the years in this direction (links in this meta question).

And like the weather, no one ever seems to do anything about it.

What are some suggestions for questions, or general areas of questions from which we could generate a little more easily, ideas for questions?

Yes, this may be a little weird because why ask a question you may already know the answer to since actually asking it may come across as inauthentic. But I think asking interesting questions would be a good spur to ELU

What I am looking for is suggestion areas to help those with experience here to create questions with interesting content.

Here's a vague start:

• Language Log topics - There's a recent LL post about how people pronounce 'sts' at the end of words. What about 'sks' and 'sps' (as in 'whisks' and 'crisps'?
• old William Safire On Language articles for which he botched the answer (eg all of them?).
• Things in the news. I personally feel the 'covfefe' question was idiocy (I have stronger words for all the surrounding commentary), but at least it was interesting.
• Accents produced in media: I'm always watching TV shows that come from the UK (I'm AmE). And so I always have questions about pronunciation and local varieties.
• Where is Yoichi? Those were always great questions even when mechanically off-topic.

Sure, we want non-closable questions - ones that aren't simply "Hey, about them funny Brits and the way they talk with their lorries and crisps and lifts and shit?" - and that are more like "Truck in the US, Lorry in the UK: what is the provenance of the different usage and shit?"

And I'm not looking for people to copy paste Grammar Girl questions and then answers. More to get inspired by a Grammar Girl question then have people try to answer it without having Grammar Girl do it.

Answer 1

When I become disappointed with the inflow of current questions on EL&U, I resort to one of two strategies—neither of which involves worrying about how to improve the quality of new questions. Either (1) I plunge into the unanswered questions queue to see whether there may not be an overlooked, answer-worthy question lurking in there, or (2) I look into old questions—especially from the 2010–2012 era, when answers tended to be considerably more off-the-cuff than they are today—in search of one that has not drawn a thoroughly researched answer.

Questions languishing in the unanswered questions queue for more than a week or two tend not to be especially fascinating, but they have escaped closure—and that automatically makes them a better bet for answering than any arbitrarily selected question in the new questions lineup. You never have to worry about a question disappearing on you midway through your answer, and it is fairly rare for such questions to be closed after you answer them.

Very old questions, meanwhile, are often very good and quite interesting, despite (in many cases) not meeting the "show research" requirement that has emerged in the past three or four years and now dominates close voting. Because many of these old questions were originally disposed of in answers of one or two short paragraphs with no supporting references, answering them more rigorously can improve the long-term value of EL&U to future site visitors.

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As for the dwindling proportion of good incoming questions, I observe that every good question that appears on English Language & Usage reduces the universe of nonduplicate good questions by one. After eight years of at least occasional good questions, it is hardly surprising that new good questions seem to be coming in at a diminishing rate.

Beyond that, I think that imposing the "show research" requirement has made it harder for questioners to ask questions of the type that Yoichi Oishi has asked for many years here, without being gadded by demands to show what they've already found out elsewhere in trying to answer their own question. As a matter of fact, Yoichi Oishi himself has had to deal multiple times in recent years with such demands. Many of his questions take this form: "I have encountered [some expression] in [some publication]. Here is the paragraph in which it occurred, for context. I would have thought that the expression meant [something] because [some reason], but it seems to have some other meaning here. Can someone explain what is going on?"

I think that these are great questions, and often they require considerable effort to answer well. But by imposing "show research" as a central requirement of all new questions, we make asking such questions unduly burdensome and we represent ourselves as fundamentally hostile to them.

For several years now, we've tried to upgrade the quality of posted questions by slapping the "show research" requirement on everything in sight, but it seems to me that doing this has not improved the quality of the questions we receive. So maybe the time has come to get rid of that close reason and to bring back "too localized"—a close reason that actually goes to the merits (or demerits) of a question, rather than throwing out questions without even reaching the question of whether they are useful, difficult, or otherwise interesting.

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For an example of a recent Yoichi-like question that is on the verge of being closed for lack of research, see What is the difference between "justice served" and "justice given"? If you think that the answer is obvious, you haven't looked at dictionary definitions of justice and tried to work out which ones apply to which of the two expressions asked about.

In my experience, EL&U gets lots of harder-than-they-look questions, but our reflexive inclination to throw them out if they don't show adequate research discourages people from coming back and asking additional questions—and I suspect that many close voters consider that a good thing.

Answer 2

Here is a lovely question with lots of potential that just got closed: How did Trump supporters construe his bugaboo term, "corruption"?

Could people interested in Mitch's question, and Mitch too of course, please take this sad orphan of a question as a guinea pig and try to rescue it for me?

By the way, I would like to see an answer here that describes how someone learned to write a well-posed ELU question, similar to the answer I wrote recently (which has a whopping net vote of 4, double that of its nearest neighbor), where I described how I learned to write a well-posed ELU answer. (I'm not the one to write a full answer here, since I clearly haven't yet learned how to write a well-posed ELU question.)