Am I the only one who thinks this question is discussion-y?

Question

Recommendations for novels written in colloquial Chinese

It got 6 upvotes, and two answers so far.

But how can anyone really know the OP's limitations? 'Easy to find in the US' is not an objective measurement. DC, LA, and NYC all have Chinatowns with different bookstores. And the selection in each bookstore is not going to be predicated on anything objective!

It's anyone's guess what random selection of books the OP has access to, and that means the question is inherently vague and subjective.

One answer begins:

I take the opposite view.

OK, if you can 'take the opposite view', in my opinion it's not fit for StackExchange, it's fit for a forum.

I see a lot wrong with this question, though. Not just that.

I find this question interesting, but too localized to be useful to anyone but the OP. The world is a shrinking place, and if you're intelligent you can find any book for sale online. It's much different and much more difficult importing stuff from China in Europe. (People in the US have it so easy that frankly, it's a bit strange to me that anyone would insist on not doing so.)

So I have a very hard time imagining what kind of google search would lead someone to this question. I think it's vague, localized, and subjective. Because of the way it's been asked, it's not even about Chinese.

Also, US-centric questions should not be asked here, in my opinion, unless they are about US-centric properties of Chinese, i.e. as it is spoken in Chinatowns in the US.

What do others think?

Answer 1

To clarify my intentions with that question: my goal was to choose criteria to make the question as useful as possible to the broader community and not fall into "infinite subjective list" trap. Previous questions have asked for movie and book suggestions based on Chinese level; I decided to focus on different (but, I thought, useful) criteria. I don't think what I've written is too broad or too narrow, since I've had discussions with many Chinese students about their desire to find novels of exactly the type I've described.

Perhaps my first point ("exciting") was too subjective, but I think that the latter two were not. (And yes, I am perfectly capable of searching for a buying books online (because, guess what? I know Chinese), and I resent the implication that I'm not intelligent for asking a question about books that are readily available outside of China.)

The truth is that easily available outside of China is a fairly objective standard; I am sure that any person on this forum who lives or has lived in China could easily say which English-language books are easy to find in China (say, Twilight) and which ones are not (say, Ulysses). Likewise with "colloquial": this is an objective criterion of use to language learners.

I agree with the idea of making a wiki for general questions about books and movies suitable for Chinese learners, but I think that this question is precise enough to be useful. Perhaps edits are necessary, but this closure seems like a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Answer 2

I agree with you and that's why I posted a meta question "Recommendation questions: let's make some Wikis for future reference", although I haven't received any answers so far.

Questions that don't look for a single answer (or a very narrow range of possibilities), are questions eligible to be closed as subjective, because they solicit discussion, opinions, polls and they might have the opposite effect on the community.

We have 3 ways out:

1. Close the question.
2. Edit it in order to remove the subjective component.
3. Create wikis so that when someone else asks something that is answered by the wikis, we can close in a less "tensed" way. :)

I tend for the third possibility, since it allows us to have important info (what chinese movies can beginners watch, what books can we read, etc) and we don't have the problem of arguing whether we should close those questions or not.

Answer 3

I think the problem in this case is that this is asking for a recommendation, but it is not a broad recommendation that will help others. The question is "recommend some novels that meet criteria A, B and C".

The questions that we should be making Community Wiki are more like "Which web sites sell a range of Chinese novels" that people can go and make up their own mind.

Subjective questions are off topic, the Community Wiki questions we want are not subjective, they are list type questions. These are two different things. We don't want an infinite list of books which might hit the target we want a finite good quality list of places where people can get books.