The "bare/bear with me" question: what should we do with it?

Question

Is it "bear" or "bare" with me?

There's been a lot of discussion on Meta in the comments about this question recently, but it's actually not the main topic of any of the recent questions. I thought I'd post a new question dedicated to this topic, so that people can keep all their discussion about it in one place.

I see several options:

• we can leave it as closed
• we can give it a historical lock
• we can reopen it (there was one vote for this last time I checked)
• we can delete it (there was also one vote for this)

Which of these do you think is best, and why?

Update: As of March 18, 2016, the question has a historical lock.

Answer 1

I asked a question about how to request a historical lock for old but seemingly popular questions that don't meet current site standards for preliminary research (or some other criterion) here: How can users nominate old, popular questions for exemption from closure as being of 'historical value'?

Since I stated explicitly there that my preference would be to preserve the "bare/bear with me" question in a locked state, it's only fair that I expose myself to the wrath of close/delete proponents by reiterating that preference here. Neither the "bare/bear with me" question nor the two answers it drew are especially substantial, but more than a million people have viewed the page since it was posted in August 2010. And though the coverage isn't deep, it is clear and accurate.

I suspect that much of the debate over this question comes down to whether (on the one hand) you think that the "bare/bear with me" question lowers the prestige of English Language & Usage and encourages similar low-brow questions from people who see it, or whether (on the other hand) you think that the primary goal of EL&U is to provide useful answers to questions of English language and usage that people are interested in, regardless of their level of sophistication. As this description of the two viewpoints indicates, it is easy for proponents of either view to talk past the other because one view does not obviously and directly entail the negation of the other.

I'm not embarrassed by the existence of the "bare/bear with me" Q&A on our site, and I think that its presence is unrelated to the flood of low-end questions that arrive here day after day. Those things happen, I believe, because the vast majority of visitors to this site are neither experts nor advanced enthusiasts when it comes to the English language. They are people who want their English-related question answered, and who either ask it here or search Google and find a related answer posted here. This is the central fact that phenry in his famous Meta post This is not a site for "serious English language enthusiasts," and it never will be insists upon: most people who use EL&U are not looking for complicated, recondite explanations of advanced linguistic phenomena; rather, they want to know the name of a color that is somewhere between crimson and scarlet, or a word that means you kind of think someone's a jerk but your mind isn't entirely made up, or the difference between start and begin, or whether you should use "bare with me" or "bear with me."

Five and a half years after the "bare/bear with me" question was posted, no one has attempted to provide a deep answer to it, which suggests to me that no one here who is capable of such an answer is inclined to provide it. That may be because knowledgeable people consider it a fundamentally uninteresting question—but their lack of interest in the question obviously doesn't extend to the Internet community at large. In any case, the 125 people who have upvoted the "bare/bear with me" question and the 224 people who have upvoted the accepted answer to it aren't zero-rep fly-by users: they are Stack Exchange participants who, one way or another, accumulated enough reputation points to cast upvotes on EL&U posts. (I am not among them, by the way.)

Still, if no one has cared to improve on the concise answers posted five years ago, I see little reason to reopen the question (which was closed earlier this month) just to make additional answers theoretically possible. That's why I would prefer to see the page given locked status. That way, it can continue to provide quick practical advice to the many people who continue to find it in Google Searches, without having the cloud of "CLOSED [for lack of adequate research]" hanging over it, and without the threat of its being deleted outright and inviting new rounds of questions about the difference between bare and bear from inquisitive visitors who find their way to EL&U.

So, to summarize, I favor the locked preservation option for the "bare/bear with me" question because (1) I think the page is useful to people who seek it here or on Google; (2) I think the locked status draws a useful line between questions that satisfied older EL&U standards but don't satisfy current standards, and questions that do meet current standards; (3) I don't think the existence of historically locked questions harms the site; and (4) I think older questions that have earned many upvotes over the years deserve a degree of respect and tolerance for having done so.

By the way, no one as yet has detailed the steps involved in giving a question a historical lock. I continue to hope that someone will provide such an answer. [[UPDATE, 3/18/16: Sumelic's answer to my "How can users nominate..." question appears to be a definitive response; I followed the method it described (namely, flagging the moderators with a request for a lock) in seeking a lock for the bare/bear question (as others may have done, too), and a moderator responded to the request(s) by locking the question—without reopening it, I might add. The result is that the question remains closed but is no longer in danger of being deleted. Thanks, mods!]]

Answer 2

For what it's worth, here's my opinion, partially copied from some comments I left earlier.

Delete: To me, it seems that there wouldn't be any damage done if we deleted it. I don't think having it on this site is helpful. (Yes; it has many upvotes. Even so, upvotes do not measure quality, and it had a head start on most of the other questions.)

The information is easy to find. Even ignoring Google, you can find most of the relevant information by simply looking up the words "bare" and "bear" in dictionaries (bear with is defined in the Merriam Webster entry for "bear," and has its own entry in the Oxford Learner's Dictionary with an example sentence that includes "bear with me").

And if you do a Google search for "is it bear with me or bare with me?", we're the first result, but our answers are short and not really any better than the multitude of other results. On the first page of the Google results, there are longer and more complete explanations such as
http://www.dailywritingtips.com/bare-or-bear-with-me/,
http://writingexplained.org/bear-with-me-or-bare-with-me-difference,
https://www.englishforums.com/English/BearBareWithMe/vclxd/post.htm.

Our main answer is just a cut-and-paste from the following source: https://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/bare.html.

One of the main goals of Stack Exchange, as I understand it, is to improve the internet by providing better or more relevant answers to Google search queries than other internet sites. I don't think this question does this.

I would be against deleting questions like the following

• Is there a phrase that means sleeping with someone without sex?
• What is the rule for adjective order?
• How do you quote a passage that has used '[sic]' mistakenly?
• What gender is generally associated with "toad" characters in English fiction and folklore?

because these questions have more answers, and each answer seems to be more valuable. What I mean by this: the answers are mostly original content rather than quotations, they are longer rather than shorter, and they seem to have more effort put into them (which makes it harder to reproduce them if the question is deleted). While the questions themselves may be off-topic, I don't want to delete bad or off-topic questions that have accumulated good answers.

Reopen: I don't think it should be reopened, because I don't think there's anything significant that a new answer could added. It's a straightforward question with a straightforward answer. In addition, reopening it, combined with its high vote count, might send the message that we welcome this kind of question, which is bad because it is clearly off-topic by today's standards. That said, I don't think it would actually change much if we reopened it, but I don't understand why some people think it would be a good idea to do this.

Historical locking seems OK. To me, the biggest plus to this is that it gets taken off the list of top-voted questions (historical locked questions only show up in search results, not in lists). The downside is that we're stuck with it forever.

Answer 3

We should just leave it closed. The advantage over deleting it is that it can be a duplicate target.

Answer 4

We need to have one standard that is applicable to all the questions regardless of when it was asked, how many views it generated, how many upvotes it has. They are all irrelevant when we decide to close it or even delete it.

A user said the question has a historical value, but I beg to differ. The question is just a general reference question without any research effort. There is nothing common between the two words etymologically or meaning-wise. The question is no better than "what is the difference between hair and hare?"

English Language and Usage (ELU) wants to differentiate its name from Yahoo Answer type of communities where you can ask whatever you want in any format. If we allow the question to remain undeleted, it will mislead users into believing that such a question had been accepted and welcomed for more than five years and it was belatedly found out by the community. What message does it give to new and future users?

I remember one new user quoted an old question which is asking for a list of words with a "historical lock" and asked. "Why can't I ask this question while you allowed this question in the past?" even though there was a clear comment by Andrew Leach stating "this question should not be used as an example for a future general reference question" (I don't remember it word for word). What if another user uses the question as an excuse or to insult or mock the integrity of this community?

The number of questions on ELU is reaching 70,000 soon and it will be more than 100,000 next year. We have to think about this. What benefit does it give to this community to let it remain on this site? What is the cost against the apparent benefit coming from removing the question from ELU?

Please read the Yahoo Answers link and see how exactly the question looks like those on Yahoo Answers. If this question were asked today, how long do you think it would take for five users to close it?

A rule is a rule because it is the rule. We deleted one-and-a-half-year old question for the same reason, What does “TL;DR:” mean? (sorry for users with less than 10,000 reputation points that you can't read it) with 2,755 views, 30 upvotes for the question, and 59 upvotes for the top ansewer, 9 upvotes for the second answer. The post date was Jan. 30, 2011 and the deletion date was Sep. 19, 2012. If the question had not been deleted, it could have generated far more views and upvotes. Who knows? What justifies deleting this question and what justifies leaving the "bear/bare" question closed? We deleted a very popular question with a lot of upvotes. Why can't we delete the "bear/bare" question? I don't see any difference between the two questions, but if someone asks me to choose only one between the two to delete, I will choose the "bear/bare" question.

Are we aiming for double standards? The Original Poster of the "TL;DR" question and answers were just unlucky while the "bear/bare" posters are very lucky to have your sympathy? Where is fairness?