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Is there a special policy for Politics.SE?

I wonder how it is possible to avoid a general debate spilling over in the questions, and how to avoid an avalanche of politically motivated upvotes and downvotes.

Is the tradition of using proper and decent language etc. is sufficient?

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You can read on meta and on the main politics site for a while to get a feeling for the site specific policies on politics.

For me, the most different aspects are the two top community-specific close reasons. The first is useful in limiting idle speculation, and the alternative (What have experts said about it?) usually results in better questions.

The second custom close reason "primary purpose of this question appears to be to promote or discredit a specific political cause, group or politician" limits extremely unbalanced questions and works surprisingly well when used sparingly.

And the general focus on one topic per question only (not politics specific) helps in keeping general debate from spilling over. Also mods are indeed cleaning up conversational comments.

As for the voting, well it depends on everyone being able to vote somewhat objectively on content, e.g. upvote it when it is clear and useful even if one doesn't agree.

It's an experiment and it could easily fail with the wrong kind of people but interestingly it doesn't for many years now in my opinion. Contributions are fairly weighted and typically informative.

Of course there is some bias and I would not trust the scores too much, rather look at the content. And it certainly requires ongoing effort to keep it that way.

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  • I am used to using Mathematics.SE, Physics, where opinions are less of a problem, I asked on Philosophy.SE whether it is right that there can be no absolute correct -or even clear - statements. One comment was: "Yes, Duhem-Quine is almost infinitely extendable. All things we think we know, are only known because of supporting evidence. And every "known" thing could in principle be replaced with an infinity of more complex "facts" that reduces to what we think we know as a special case." Most stratements can therefore be said to be very close to opinions.
    – Mikael Jensen
    Commented Nov 15 at 19:16
  • @MikaelJensen Evidence is a good point. People here will inevitably ask for presenting some evidence. And there is voting and of course you can just read everything and form your own opinion.
    – NoDataDumpNoContribution
    Commented Nov 15 at 20:07
  • Consider two ”verifications” from two different views illustrating Duhem-Quine’s thesis: 1) The US and Israel are committed to peace, and the $4 billion annual assistance is a verification of the US commitment, and 2) The US is committed to have a dominant military role in the oil-producing region, and use the Israel-Palestinian conflict as the engine and the $4 billion per year is a verification of this. ($4 billion from the definition on antisemitism on nexusproject.us)
    – Mikael Jensen
    Commented Nov 17 at 12:29
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    @MikaelJensen Any such statement would require an on-topic question to be made. I can't see an on-topic question that would be answered by your examples. A question that is not primarily opinion based would be "How much money does the US send to Israel every year?" and that would be answered by a simple "$4 billion" with a better answer showing which programs are involved and by how much.
    – xyldke
    Commented Nov 19 at 8:36
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    @MikaelJensen Another option would be a question about the opinion of a certain political actor: "How does the State Department justify the $4 billion sent to Israel every year" - "The State Department claims this supports peace and stability in the region" (Note that this may not be the actual stated reason, I'm just using your example). This is a subjective fact about the US position, even people who don't believe that the US is interested in peace would agree that the State Department says that. You could, of course, ask a similar question about a different group.
    – xyldke
    Commented Nov 19 at 8:43
  • @xyldke I realize this is a Q/A site and not a discussion forum, but we cannot completely avoid ueberbau in our thinking.
    – Mikael Jensen
    Commented Nov 19 at 9:37
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Yeah, there's plenty of site specific policies here and on any other site. For example, community specific close reasons. Another example is the policies related to the Ukraine war. There's many more.

As for avoiding debate, that's not a site specific thing. Every site closes questions as Opinion-based. Voting based on opinions is also suspend able (everywhere) as voting irregularities.

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