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A lot of new users ask questions regarding lyrics interpretation.

I was going through the What topics can I ask about here? page in the help center, and noticed that lyrics interpretation is not specifically mentioned in the don'ts.

This answer does a pretty good job of summing up when a lyrics interpretation question is on topic and when it isn't.

Any way we could succintly include the information on the said page?

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    +1. We might consider expanding the "critical interpretation" bullet under "please don't ask" to include both lyrics and poetry, which we also get sometimes.
    – Dan Bron
    May 28, 2015 at 14:04
  • @DanBron: Good idea. Now, how to get in touch with people who could do that?
    – Tushar Raj
    May 28, 2015 at 14:08
  • Exactly as you are doing. The mods monitor requests like this on Meta, and they're the ones who can effect such changes (some require a Community Manager, and in that case a mod can contact one, or sometimes they browse the various site metas on their own looking for feedback like this).
    – Dan Bron
    May 28, 2015 at 14:29
  • The lyrics deciphering/transcription/interpretation is just a part of the one bigger problem - converting any spoken text into a written form. I am sure that the professional approach is not to separate one from another (lyrics, verse, song, movies...). Yes, this might draw too many frivolous questions, some of them will be very hard (or even impossible) to answer to, but maybe this should exist as a separate chat-like place on the Web (maybe with voting mechanism because there might be very interesting questions)?
    – lyrically wicked
    May 29, 2015 at 6:48
  • @lyricallywicked Such places exist (not only for lyrics but poetry and literature too), but the content is generally low-quality because it is uncurated and un-reviewed. I think the challenge would be coming up with a framework which could reliably distinguish "high-quality options" from "low-quality" opinions. Creating a fair voting model for factual/objective questions is hard enough, but if you could create one for subjective questions, I think you'd make a lot of money indeed.
    – Dan Bron
    May 29, 2015 at 9:33
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    @DanBron Actually, I didn't see a place where one can freely go and post, say, any link to any Youtube media fragment and ask: "Please, help me to transcribe what is being said in there". The biggest problem is to attract enough people (native speakers) who are willing to answer, but the principle is simple: if you want to answer (especially if you like the linked media), you answer. If topic starter is satisfied with the answer and accepts, everything is okay. And there is absolutely no need to curate/review such questions in some special way, that's why I proposed something similar to chat.
    – lyrically wicked
    Jun 1, 2015 at 6:33
  • @lyricallywicked yahoo answers, quora, numerous lyrics websites
    – Mitch
    Jun 9, 2015 at 13:00
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    On a related note, could we open a close reason to migrate questions about lyrics to the Music Fans SE? Perhaps once it's out of Beta, in case we accidentally refer to a possibly-future-defunct site :D?
    – Teacher KSHuang
    Mar 13, 2017 at 11:51

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