The question Single word for something that is “not yet a fact” but very close? erupted into a furious flurry of answers, comments and hostility over the last few hours. Twice I was in the process of composing a comment when the answer I was commenting on was deleted. In both cases, my comment had included a recommendation to take up the discussion here.
I'm not disputing whether the action taken in deleting the posts was appropriate. However, I'm concerned that ordinary EL&U members like me, with only modest rep points, seem to have no access to what's going on behind the scenes and therefore no ability to reflect on the process.
In particular, the most recent remaining post has been locked and has the following message:
This post has been locked while disputes about its content are being resolved. For more info visit meta.
This seems entirely inadequate: visiting Meta provides no information on this specific issue at all, and presumably means "we have a Meta site, go search there for something that might explain the general process for how this issue will be dealt with".
I'm reasonably experienced with both the general expectations and processes, and the things you can find in Meta, but what's happened with the several posts to this particular question seems very opaque, and the auto message doesn't seem very helpful.
And we also lost a valuable answer by Mary_Mag (?) when it potentially could have been edited to save it.
Again, this is not a criticism of any decisions taken, but I'd like to understand what's happened. And I do think the message referring to Meta needs to be better worded or have a more targetted link.