Proposal to merge ELU and ELL

Question

Over the past few years, I have spent some time on ELU and ELL. (I deleted several accounts, so my current account is very new, in case you are wondering.)

I understand that ELL was formed because of the dropping standard of questions asked by mostly learners of the language. If I recall correctly, however, Robert Cartaino never saw the need for a separate ELL, and it was Jeff Atwood's intervention that made ELL come into existence just before he left SE. (Forgive me if this is wrong.) At that time, I agreed with Robert's view that there should not be two separate sites. I will list a number of observations I have made which you may not agree with:

1. In many cases, it is difficult and largely subjective where to draw the line between whether a question fits better on ELL or ELU. Many questions that can benefit one community of users also benefit the other, if one is seriously interested in the language.

2. Learners of the language actually learn grammar formally and ask many interesting and technical questions about grammar on ELL that many native speakers do not know about. On the other hand, many native speakers actually ask questions such as single word requests which should not be the focus of ELU anyway.

3. Many questions asked by learners are actually non-trivial but get interpreted as trivial by some native speakers. Hence they get downvoted and closevoted more than they actually deserve. Sometimes, a seemingly local question may be part of a larger, global theory of the language, and illuminating answers can salvage a less than perfectly phrased question.

4. On some days, the quality of questions and answers on ELL seems way higher than that on ELU. ELU, despite what is advertised, is not actually for linguists, etymologists, and serious enthusiasts, and never will be. The point is that standards on ELL are so high and ELU so low that the two sites really are the same.

5. It seems pretty arbitary which posts on ELU get migrated to ELL, and looking at some of these and how similar they are to other posts, we might as well migrate half of ELU to ELL. If the sites are merged, we will not waste time migrating questions between them, and the single merged site can benefit from shared human resources. It would be easier for genuine enthusiasts to see all questions at one glance, and users not interested in particular kinds of questions can just choose to ignore them.

Before you downvote this post, do spend at least a month on each of the two sites, and perhaps you will realise that you agree with me. I propose that ELU and ELL be merged, because they were never meant to be separate in the first place. Thank you for considering this suggestion.

(This post is also on ELL meta.)

Answer 1

No mechanical changes will fix the problems with ELU because those problems are cultural. The site is inhabited by two tribes, each bearing a curse that keeps them locked in a deadly embrace of mutual incomprehension. The first group, which I have been known to call the CPVPV¹ has a proprietary interest in the site, regarding it as a worthy research institution, part of the academy, if you will, and (as I also have been known to say) High Table at the Hall or the Fellows' Common Room at the College. For a glimpse of this attitude, you may go here where you'll find worries about the "drain on our site quality", the influx of "low quality contributions" that drive away the"experts we seek to attract", and a reminder that this is "a site for linguists, etymologists, and serious English-language experts." Now this last claim may be debatable², but to be fair it's almost a verbatim description of the site from its Welcome page³, as those who enjoy the irony of that label may see by navigating there.

The group labors under the curse of knowledge. I take this phrase from Steven Pinker, who uses it in his book The Sense of Style to explain why experts often write so badly about what they know the best. Pinker means that experts know what they know and can no longer imagine not knowing it. They thus cannot tell when they've left out explication crucial to the understanding of non-experts. I adopt the term to mean people fluent in a language and unable to imagine what it's like not to be. This leads to the explanation that questions are "lazy" (see above), and by implication, so are the questioners. "Do the research!" is the j'accuse, and if the lazy would vanish, in the words of the post I cited, it would be "good riddance with bad rubbish!"⁴.

Those thus contemned are subject to a complementary curse, the curse of ignorance, and by this, I don't mean not knowing something. That is, after all, the human condition. I mean not knowing a critical organizing principle. This is hard to define for language, but it's the language processing that allows fluent speakers to automatically process syntax, idiom, collocations, irony, humor, etc. It's like breathing -- under conscious control when we focus; autonomic, when we don't.

<tl arg=dr>
Perhaps this is the organ that processes Chomsky's universal grammar, but since no one has ever seen such a thing, perhaps an example from another venue will serve as an analogy. The organizing principle of biology is evolution through natural selection, and in a famous paper, a notable biologist wrote Nothing in Biology Makes Sense except in the Light of Evolution. Before Darwin, biologists (who probably called themselves naturalists) proposed other explanations for the biosphere. Perhaps it's the split between sea and land that's important. Perhaps every terrestrial species has a thalassal counterpart. (Which is why we have sea horses and sea cows and sea oats.) In retrospect and with the advantage (and the curse) of knowledge, it's easy to laugh at these efforts. Without the organizing principle, investigators are mere collectors of facts and artifacts that don't fit together. Examples abound -- dynamics before Newton explained inertia, particle physics before electrochromodynamics⁵, to name just two.
</tl>

This is not to say that ELU is not visisted by lazy seekers of easy answers for their homework. It is, but it's easy to forget how useless it is for many to hear the exhortations to do the research and consult the general references. The instructions for the research tools are written in idiomatic English, the answers are presented in idiomatic English, the exceptions are noted in idiomatic English, and the examples are given in idiomatic English. And as hard as it is for the fluent to understand, this will defeat people whose knowledge consists of an unorganized collection of facts about the language.

(And let's hope the unwary don't try typing their query in the ELU search box. They'll be directed to what I sometimes feel is Borgesian library, which will likely have their exact question and a correct answer, but also every question close but not quite apt and every possible answer including the misleading and the outright wrong. I'm a native speaker, and I'm afraid to go in there.)

Suppose this site were English Spelling and Orthography, which received questions like

I need to know how to spell a pulmonary disease that sounds like new-MOAN-yah. I checked and it doesn't start with the letter n.

Do the research, the OP is told, and he starts to work backwards from n, soon finding that

mnemonoic starts with a silent m. Does new-MOAN-yah?

Nope, try again, he's told, and off he goes finding silent and doubled letters. It will him take a while to circle back to the p's. His betters, of course, know the organizaing principle of etymology, the Greek part in this case.

I'm not choosing sides here. It's not a question of who's right and who's wrong about what ELU is or should be. There have been many proposals for "fixing" ELU -- requiring a test for posters, banning SWRs, instituting tag privileges, and now merging with ELL. These are what I call mechanical fixes, and I think these are doomed without a community consensus on the nature of the site.

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1. Committee for the Preservation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice
2. Not debatable. What's that other word? Oh, yeah -- risible.
3. The official version uses enthusiasts instead of experts, but close enough.
4. I prefer good riddance to, but with works for me.
5. That's quarks.